Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a nineteenth-century American novelist and short story writer. He is recognized, with his close contemporaries Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, as a key figure in the development of a distinctly American literature. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that town. His great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the judges who oversaw the Salem witch trials of 1692. Hawthorne added a "w" to his surname when he began to write, in an effort to distance himself from his notorious ancestors. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, where he befriended future president Franklin Pierce and future poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He graduated in 1825 and returned to Salem, where he devoted himself to writing. He published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. He later tried to suppress it, feeling that it was not equal to the standard of his later work. He published several short stories in periodicals, which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. He became engaged to Sophia Peabody in 1838 and worked at the Boston Custom House to support his family. He married Sophia in 1842 and moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where he befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He published a second collection of stories, Mosses from an Old Manse, in 1846. In 1849, he published The Scarlet Letter, a novel about adultery and guilt in colonial America. The book was a critical and commercial success, and established Hawthorne as a major writer. He followed it with The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a Gothic romance set in his native Salem. He also wrote The Blithedale Romance (1852), a novel based on his experience at Brook Farm, a utopian community, and The Marble Faun (1860), a novel set in Italy. Hawthorne also wrote several children's books, such as Tanglewood Tales (1853), and a campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce (1852). Hawthorne traveled to Europe in 1853, after Pierce appointed him as the United States consul in Liverpool, England. He spent six years abroad, mostly in England and Italy. He returned to America in 1860 and settled in The Wayside, his home in Concord. He died of an internal hemorrhage in 1864, while on a trip to the White Mountains with Pierce. He was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. Hawthorne's works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His use of allegory and symbolism make his writings highly original and influential. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of all time.