Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, into a family whose roots reached back to the earliest decades of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ^[1]. His father, a ship's captain also named Nathaniel Hathorne, died of yellow fever in Suriname in 1808, leaving the four-year-old boy to be raised by his mother, Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne, in the crowded household of her Manning relatives ^[2]. The family name carried a weight the future writer never escaped: his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne served as a magistrate during the Salem witch trials of 1692 and, unlike some of his colleagues, never expressed public regret for his role ^[1]. Hawthorne later added the letter w to his surname, a change many biographers read as an attempt to put distance between himself and that inheritance ^[3].

A leg injury at age nine kept the boy housebound for an extended period, and he filled the time with reading, developing the bookish habits that shaped his later career ^[2]. In 1816 the family spent time at the Manning property near Raymond, Maine, where Hawthorne roamed the woods around Sebago Lake and later recalled the interval as among the freest of his life ^[2]. In 1821 his uncles financed his enrollment at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. His classmates there included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, the future fourteenth president of the United States, whose friendship would alter the course of Hawthorne's life decades later ^[1]. He graduated in 1825, an indifferent student by his own admission but already determined to write.

After Bowdoin, Hawthorne returned to his mother's house in Salem and spent roughly a dozen years in what he later described as a lonely apprenticeship, reading widely and teaching himself the craft of fiction ^[2]. His first book, the novel Fanshawe, appeared anonymously at his own expense in 1828. Embarrassed by it, he tried to recall and destroy the copies, and he never acknowledged the book during his lifetime ^[1]. The short tales he wrote in these years fared better. Pieces such as "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil" appeared in magazines and annual gift books, usually without his name attached ^[3].

The turning point came in 1837, when he gathered his scattered stories into Twice-Told Tales, published under his own name at last ^[1]. Longfellow reviewed the collection warmly in the North American Review, and Hawthorne began to acquire a reputation, though sales remained modest ^[3]. Any account of Nathaniel Hawthorne facts has to reckon with how slowly recognition arrived: he was in his mid-thirties, still financially dependent on political patronage jobs, when the literary world first learned his name.

Money remained a constant problem. He worked as a measurer at the Boston Custom House from 1839 to 1840, then invested in the utopian community at Brook Farm in West Roxbury in 1841, an experiment in communal living he abandoned within the year ^[2]. The experience later supplied raw material for his novel The Blithedale Romance. From 1846 to 1849 he held the post of surveyor at the Salem Custom House, a political appointment he lost when the Whigs took power in Washington ^[1]. The dismissal stung, but it freed him for the most productive stretch of his career.

In 1850 Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, the novel on which his reputation chiefly rests ^[1]. Set in seventeenth-century Boston, it follows Hester Prynne, condemned to wear a scarlet A for adultery, and traces the corrosive secret guilt of her partner, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale. The book opens with "The Custom-House," a long autobiographical sketch that settled scores with Salem and framed the tale as a recovered historical document ^[3]. The novel sold out its first printing quickly and made Hawthorne, at forty-five, a major figure in American letters ^[1]. Critics then and since have treated it as one of the first great American novels, and it has never gone out of print ^[4].

The years that followed were remarkably fertile. The House of the Seven Gables (1851), drawing on the curse-laden history of a Salem family and an actual gabled house owned by his cousin, examined how the sins of one generation poison the next ^[1]. The Blithedale Romance appeared in 1852, and A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853) retold Greek myths for children, work that reflected his standing as one of the era's notable children's writers ^[2]. His story collections, including Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) and The Snow-Image (1852), contained tales such as "Rappaccini's Daughter" and "The Birth-mark" that remain staples of American classrooms ^[3].

Among Nathaniel Hawthorne achievements, his influence on fellow writers deserves particular mention. Herman Melville, whom Hawthorne befriended in the Berkshires in 1850, dedicated Moby-Dick to him in 1851, writing that the dedication expressed admiration for Hawthorne's genius ^[5]. Melville's essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses" argued that the quiet New Englander possessed a darkness of vision comparable to Shakespeare's ^[5]. Later admirers included Henry James, who published a book-length study of Hawthorne in 1879, treating him as the essential American predecessor ^[6].

On July 9, 1842, Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody of Salem, a painter and illustrator whose sisters Elizabeth and Mary were prominent in Boston's educational and reform circles ^[1]. The couple began married life at the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, a house that had belonged to Ralph Waldo Emerson's family, and Hawthorne recorded those years as the happiest he had known ^[2]. Concord placed him in daily reach of Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, though he kept a wry distance from Transcendentalist enthusiasm ^[3].

The Hawthornes had three children: Una, born in 1844; Julian, born in 1846, who became a writer himself and published memoirs of his parents; and Rose, born in 1851, who late in life founded a Catholic religious community devoted to nursing cancer patients ^[2]. In 1852 the family purchased The Wayside in Concord, the only house Hawthorne ever owned, previously home to the Alcott family ^[7].

By temperament Hawthorne was reserved, even shy, a man who preferred observation to conversation. His notebooks, published after his death, reveal a sharp comic eye alongside the brooding moral imagination of his fiction ^[2]. His marriage, by the testimony of both partners' letters, was unusually close, and Sophia edited and published his journals during her widowhood ^[3].

Hawthorne's college friendship with Franklin Pierce paid an unexpected dividend in 1852, when he wrote Pierce's campaign biography for the presidential election ^[1]. After winning the White House, Pierce appointed him United States consul at Liverpool, then one of the most lucrative posts in the foreign service. Hawthorne served there from 1853 to 1857, handling the affairs of American sailors and merchants in Britain's busiest Atlantic port ^[1]. The appointment made him, for the only time in his life, financially comfortable, and it explains why standard references list diplomat among his occupations.

When the consulship ended, the family traveled in France and Italy from 1858 to 1859. Rome and Florence gave Hawthorne the material for The Marble Faun (1860), his last completed novel, a story of American artists entangled in a killing in Rome ^[1]. Back in England he assembled Our Old Home (1863), a book of essays on English life that he dedicated to Pierce, a gesture that cost him readers in the North because of Pierce's unpopular sympathy for the South during the Civil War ^[3].

The Hawthornes returned to The Wayside in 1860, but the writer's health declined steadily and his energy for sustained work faded. He left four romances unfinished ^[2]. In May 1864 he set out on a recuperative tour of New Hampshire with Pierce. On May 19, 1864, Hawthorne died in his sleep at a hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire ^[1]. He was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord on a hillside later called Authors Ridge, where Emerson, Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott also lie ^[7]. Longfellow and Emerson were among the mourners.

Few American writers are read as continuously as Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter became a fixture of school curricula and has been adapted repeatedly for stage and film, including a 1926 silent picture with Lillian Gish and a 1995 Hollywood version ^[4]. Scholars treat his work as a founding document of the American romance tradition, a strain of fiction more concerned with moral allegory and psychological shadow than with social realism ^[6]. Henry James's 1879 study fixed the image of Hawthorne as the first American novelist of genuine international standing ^[6].

The physical traces of any Nathaniel Hawthorne biography are unusually well preserved. The House of the Seven Gables in Salem operates as a museum that draws visitors from around the world, with Hawthorne's relocated birthplace on its grounds ^[8]. The Old Manse and The Wayside in Concord are both maintained as historic sites, the latter as part of Minute Man National Historical Park ^[7]. Salem, the city he portrayed with such ambivalence, now embraces him: a bronze statue by Bela Lyon Pratt has stood on Hawthorne Boulevard since 1925 ^[8].

His themes have proved durable because they are not confined to Puritan New England. Stories of concealed guilt, inherited wrong, and the gap between public virtue and private conscience continue to speak to readers, and writers from Melville to the present have worked in his shadow ^[5]. Two centuries after his birth, the shy man from Salem remains required reading, which is perhaps the plainest measure of what he accomplished.