Perhaps Hawthorne's long sentences daunt the nominal scholars. The two essays I looked at used shorter sentences, and used keywords likely to catch a teacher's eye, but were very much duller than the story. I hope I'm being too cynical about popularity--but I doubt it.
His short story "Christmas Banquet" doesn't seem to be assigned so often. (An unusual bequest creates a yearly Christmas banquet for the most miserable people in the city. Read it.) There are a few timely zingers:
There was a modern philanthropist, who had become so deeply sensible of the calamities of thousands and millions of his fellow-creatures, and of the impracticableness of any general measures for their relief, that he had no heart to do what little good lay immediately within his power, but contented himself with being miserable for sympathy. Near him sat a gentleman in a predicament hitherto unprecedented, but of which the present epoch probably affords numerous examples. Ever since he was of capacity to read a newspaper, this person had prided himself on his consistent adherence to one political party, but, in the confusion of these latter days, had got bewildered and knew not whereabouts his party was. This wretched condition, so morally desolate and disheartening to a man who has long accustomed himself to merge his individuality in the mass of a great body, can only be conceived by such as have experienced it. ... a woman of unemployed energy, who found herself in the world with nothing to achieve, nothing to enjoy, and nothing even to suffer. She had, therefore, driven herself to the verge of madness by dark broodings over the wrongs of her sex, and its exclusion from a proper field of action.
The current gutenberg version has "dark breedings" instead of "dark broodings." I pinged the team
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