Publisher Description
"Rappaccini's Daughter" is a Gothic short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the December 1844. It is about Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher in Padua, Italy, who grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes poisonous to others.
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About Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) is considered to be one of the greatest American authors of the nineteenth century. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and made his ambition to be a writer while still a teenager. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where the poet Longfellow was also a student, and spent several years traveling in New England and writing short stories before his best known novel, The Scarlet Letter, was published in 1850. His writing was not at first financially rewarding, and he worked as measurer and surveyor in the Boston and Salem Custom Houses. In 1853 he was sent to Liverpool as American consul and then lived in Italy before returning to the United States in 1860.