A Wonder Book for Girls & Boys

A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) is a children's book by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in which he retells several Greek myths. Hawthorne expressed his idea to rewrite Greek myths as early as 1846 when he outlined a book to Evert Augustus Duyckinck of stories "taken out of the cold moonshine of classical mythology, and modernized, or perhaps gothicized, so that they may be felt by children of these days." In 1851, just after the birth of his daughter Rose he proposed the idea again in the form of a collection of six tales.