"Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theatre of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen half-existent influences hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population."
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was a key American novelist and writer of short stories. I've collected public domain etexts of his seven novels and prepared HTML versions of them here.