He has his moments, but they're few and far between.

At his worst, he writes some of the most turgid and protracted prose in American literature.

At his best, he's just dull.

I'm really surprised that Hawthorne hasn't just disappeared with time. His writing is extremely dense and slow. You can read 20 pages of Hawthorne, and nothing happens. The House of Seven Gables may be the worst book I've ever read. It's just full of pointless details. For example, it took 20 some pages for the girl in the book to decide to move a dresser from one side of the room to another.  What's the point? This book could have been written in less than 50 pages without losing anything important. The book was so dense and boring that it usually took me a week just to read a couple of chapters.   Maybe some of his other books are better, but I wouldn't know, because after reading The House of Seven Gables I decided to never read anything else written by Hawthorne.

Strange, I like Melville but I can't stand Hawthorne. There's a personal reason to this. I remember taking an American Lit. course as a sophomore in college. I did really bad on the first exam (had no idea what Emerson or Thoreau were talking about). During Spring Break, I had to read Scarlet Letter subsequent to the Mid-Term. I would read the book and after struggling through 30 pages in 2 hours, I realized I had no idea what I read. This went on for days (of course, trying to do anything when I was doing 3-a-day workouts for Crew during spring break did not help). I honestly could not recall one detail about Scarlet Letter other than some chick had to wear an A. I thought it was because she was an A--hole. When the mid-term came, of course 5 out of six questions dealt with Scarlet Letter. I think I wrote something to the effect that Moby Dick was better, left 30 minutes early and dropped the course the next day. Years later I saw the movie version with Demi Moore...and fell asleep.

I think he established he doesn't care much for puritans. I don't like his stories because his writing style is very, very slow. Not every little twig in the story has to be some kind of metaphor. Hawthorne, however, refuses to answer his own questions raised in a story. I admire his ability to create ambiguity.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was amazing. He really made us understand the depth of a character as shown in The Scarlet Letter. He also shows human nature.

If I wanted to be smacked upside the head with allegory, I would go read "Pilgrims Progress." I shall commend him for some of the sypathy shown in "Scarlet Letter," but "Young Goodman Brown" and its ilk have the subtlety of a 12 ton load of bricks. I must commend DG's comment, since I couldn't have put it better myself.

His delicate touch with symbolism is a bit like parking an SUV on the reader's face. (Er ... which itself is just a simile, I think).

Too much. He should have tried writing to get his point across, not to make his readers fall asleep.