NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

(1804-1864)

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an unusually handsome man, with a loving and beloved wife. By mid-life he had earned recognition as a writer and won the admiration of his contemporaries. His own father, a sea captain, died during a voyage and left his grief-stricken wife with three infants to rise and few resources beyond the charity of relatives.

Hawthorne attended Salem schools and college at Bowdon in Maine. He chewed tobacco, played cards, drank wine at the taverns, and avoided intellectual company in favor of pleasure.

In the spring of 1825, he graduated in the middle of his class, determinedly unhonored. Returning to Salem, Hawthorne set himself up in what he called the "dismal chamber," a room on the third floor of the family house. He kept himself prisoner there until he had learned the craft of fiction and had begun to understand what he, as an American, might have to say through it. This lonely apprenticeship took him twelve years.

In 1837 to publish a collection of stories with the unassuming title, Twice-Told Tales. They nonetheless offered a unique foretaste of Hawthorne's singular vision, that of the human heart as a lurking place for the secrets of past violence. The book was favorably reviewed by his friend Longfellow and, in a later edition, by Poe.

Hawthorne went off to West Roxbury to join the Utopian experiment in communal living at Brook Farm. It did not suit him. Neither the shoveling of manure nor the endless, lofty discussions of the Transcendentalists appealed to him. Although he left after a few months, he made good use of the experience later, in his novel The Blithedale Romance (1852).

In 1842, Hawthorne and his wife moved into the Old Manse in Concord, where Emerson had lived before them. The Scarlet Letter is set in Puritan Boston during the mid-seventeenth century. The title refers to a cloth letter, A, which the narrator finds in a customhouse, along with documents outlining the tragic story of Hester Prynne, who bore an illegitimate child. Refusing to name its father, she was sentenced to wear the scarlet A (for adultery) on her breast. The story is about sin and redemption, and the tragic consequences of hypocrisy and concealed guilt. When The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, it brought Hawthorne wide acclaim, some money, and the admiration and friendship of Herman Melville. This success continued. Another novel, The House of the Seven Gables, appeared the following year, as well as another collection of stories. The Snow-Image. In 1853, Hawthorne's friend Franklin Pierce became President and offered Hawthorne the post of United States consul at Liverpool. Hawthorne accepted willingly. He and his family lived in Europe for seven years. Hawthorne wrote, traveled, filled his notebooks, and worked on an ambitious novel. The Marble Faun, a romance set in Italy and published in 1860, when he returned to America. Back in Concord, he did manage to convert his English journals into the book Our Old Home (1863).

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