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. It was followed by a sequel, Tanglewood Tales. Overview The stories in A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys are all stories within a story. The frame story is that Eunice Bright, a Williams College student, is telling these tales to a group of children at Tanglewood, an area in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Hawthorne lived for a time. All the tales are modified versions of ancient Greek myths: "The Gorgon's Head" - recounts the story of Perseus killing Medusa at the request of the king of the island, Polydectes. "The Golden Touch" - recounts the story of King Midas and his "Golden Touch". "The Paradise of Children" - recounts the story of Pandora opening the box filled with all of mankind's Troubles. "The Three Golden Apples" - recounts the story of Heracles procuring the Three Golden Apples from the Hesperides' orchard, with the help of Atlas. "The Miraculous Pitcher" - recounts the story of Baucis and Philemon providing food and shelter to two strangers who were Zeus and "Quicksilver" (Hermes) in disguise. Baucis and Philemon were rewarded by the gods for their kindness; they were promised never to live apart from one another. "The Chimæra" - recounts the story of Bellerophon taming Pegasus and killing the Chimæra. Composition and publication history 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. His aim would be, he wrote, "substituting a tone in some degree Gothic or romantic, or any such tone as may please myself, instead of the classic coldness, which is as repellent as the touch of marble... and, of course, I shall purge out all the old heathen wickedness, and put in a moral wherever practicable." Publisher James Thomas Fields pushed for Hawthorne to complete the project quickly. Fields had begun reissuing the author's earlier series for children titled Grandfather's Child, originally published by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and now renamed True Stories from History and