“Rappaccini’s Daughter” is one of the best-known short stories by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). First published in 1844, it tells a story settled in medieval Padua, where Giovanni Guasconti, a young student, started to frequent the house of Giacomo Rappaccini, a physician who grows a garden of poisonous plants. Guasconti is told by another physician to avoid Rappaccini, but he falls in love with his daughter Beatrice…“Rappaccini’s Daughter” has been the source for several plays and screen adaptations.This edition also includes “Hawthorne and his Mosses” (1850), a beautiful essay written by Herman Melville (1819–1891), the author of “Moby Dick” (1851).