Man's Accidents and God's Purposes presents a new interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's aesthetic theory. It addresses itself primarily to the question of what Hawthorne was attempting in the often apparently misleading construction of his fiction. By approaching the problem of the meaning of Hawthorne's works through a discussion of the formal principles which lie behind them, Folsom suggests a variety of explanations for a number of the traditional "cruxes" of Hawthorne scholarship.