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{{Short description|American author (1804–1864)}}
<b>Nathaniel Hawthorne</b> (], ] - ], ]) was an early ] ] ] and ] author. He was born in ] and died in ]. After he died, some of his works were edited by his wife and published for the first time.
{{use mdy dates|date=December 2014}}
{{Infobox writer <!-- for more information see ] -->
| name = Nathaniel Hawthorne
| image = Nathaniel Hawthorne by Brady, 1860-64.jpg
| caption = Hawthorne in the 1860s
| birth_name = Nathaniel Hathorne
| birth_date = {{birth date|1804|7|4}}
| birth_place = ], U.S.
| death_date = {{death date and age|1864|5|19|1804|7|4}}
| death_place = ], U.S.
| alma_mater = ]
| spouse = {{marriage|]|1842}}
| children = 3, including ] and ]
| signature = Nathaniel Hawthorne signature.svg
}}
'''Nathaniel Hawthorne''' (born '''Nathaniel Hathorne'''; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.


He was born in 1804 in ], from a family long associated with that town. Hawthorne entered ] in 1821, was elected to ] in 1824,<ref> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120103230618/http://www.pbk.org/infoview/PBK_InfoView.aspx?t=&id=59 |date=January 3, 2012 }}, Phi Beta Kappa website, accessed Oct 4, 2009</ref> and graduated in 1825. He published his first work in 1828, the novel '']''; he later tried to suppress it, feeling that it was not equal to the standard of his later work.<ref>{{cite book|last=Hawthorne|first=Nathaniel|title=Fanshawe|year=1828|publisher=Marsh & Capen|location=Boston|isbn=9781404713475 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=yVQ4AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA72}}</ref> He published several short stories in periodicals, which he collected in 1837 as '']''. The following year, he became engaged to ]. He worked at the ] and joined ], a ] community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to ] in ], later moving to Salem, ], then to ] in Concord. '']'' was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment as consul took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to Concord in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's most famous works include:

*<i>]</i> (1850)
Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on ], and many works feature moral ]s with an anti-] inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the ] and, more specifically, ]. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity. His published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his college friend ], written for his 1852 campaign for ], which Pierce won, becoming the 14th president.
*<i>]</i>

==Biography==

===Early life===
], 1841 (Peabody Essex Museum)]]
Nathaniel Hathorne, as his name was originally spelled, was born on July 4, 1804, in ], Massachusetts; ] is preserved and open to the public.<ref>Haas, Irvin. ''Historic Homes of American Authors''. Washington, DC: The Preservation Press, 1991: 118. {{ISBN|0891331808}}.</ref> His great-great-great-grandfather, ],<!-- The correct spelling of his ancestor is "HATHORNE", without the "w". Please do not alter it. --> was a ] and the first of the family to emigrate from England. He settled in ], before moving to Salem. There he became an important member of the ] and held many political positions, including magistrate and judge, becoming infamous for his harsh sentencing.<ref>Miller, 20–21</ref> William's son, Hawthorne's great-great-grandfather ] was one of the judges who oversaw the ]. Hawthorne probably added the "w" to his surname in his early twenties, shortly after graduating from college, in an effort to dissociate himself from his notorious forebears.<ref>McFarland, 18</ref> Hawthorne's father Nathaniel Hathorne Sr. was a sea captain who died in 1808 of ] in ];<ref>Wineapple, 20–21</ref> he had been a member of the ].<ref name=hungerford1933>{{cite journal |title=Hawthorne Gossips about Salem |author=Edward B. Hungerford |journal= New England Quarterly |volume= 6 |issue=3 |pages=445–469 |year= 1933 |jstor=359552 |doi=10.2307/359552 }}</ref> After his death, his widow moved with young Nathaniel, his older sister ], and their younger sister Louisa to live with relatives named the Mannings in Salem,<ref>McFarland, 17</ref> where they lived for 10 years. Young Hawthorne was hit on the leg while playing "bat and ball" on November 10, 1813,<ref>Miller, 47</ref> and he became lame and bedridden for a year, though several physicians could find nothing wrong with him.<ref>Mellow, 18</ref>

], built in 1804<ref>Glassford, Martha Watkins and Pamela Watkins Grant. ''Raymond and Casco''. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2001: 11. {{ISBN|978-0-7385-7398-4}}</ref>]]
In the summer of 1816, the family lived as boarders with farmers<ref>Mellow, 20</ref> before moving to a home recently built specifically for them by Hawthorne's uncles Richard and Robert Manning in ], near ].<ref>Miller, 50</ref> Years later, Hawthorne looked back at his time in Maine fondly: "Those were delightful days, for that part of the country was wild then, with only scattered clearings, and nine tenths of it primeval woods."<ref>Mellow, 21</ref> In 1819, he was sent back to Salem for school and soon complained of homesickness and being too far from his mother and sisters.<ref>Mellow, 22</ref> He distributed seven issues of ''The Spectator'' to his family in August and September 1820 for fun. The homemade newspaper was written by hand and included essays, poems, and news featuring the young author's adolescent humor.<ref>Miller, 57</ref>

Hawthorne's uncle Robert Manning insisted that the boy attend college, despite Hawthorne's protests.<ref name=Edwards>Edwards, Herbert. " {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191228215328/http://www.hawthorneassoc.com/html/downeast_mag.html |date=December 28, 2019 }}", ''Downeast Magazine'', 1962</ref> With the financial support of his uncle, Hawthorne was sent to ] in 1821, partly because of family connections in the area, and also because of its relatively inexpensive tuition rate.<ref>Wineapple, 44–45</ref> Hawthorne met future president ] on the way to Bowdoin, at the stage stop in Portland, and the two became fast friends.<ref name=Edwards/> Once at the school, he also met future poet ], future congressman ], and future naval reformer ].<ref>Cheever, 99</ref> He graduated with the class of 1825, and later described his college experience to ]: {{blockquote|I was educated (as the phrase is) at Bowdoin College. I was an idle student, negligent of college rules and the Procrustean details of academic life, rather choosing to nurse my own fancies than to dig into Greek roots and be numbered among the learned Thebans.<ref>Miller, 76</ref>}}

===Early career===
], Custom House Street, where Hawthorne worked c. 1839–40<ref>George Edwin Jepson. "Hawthorne in the Boston Custom House". . August 1904.</ref>]]

Hawthorne's first published work, ], based on his experiences at Bowdoin College, appeared anonymously in October 1828, printed at the author's own expense of $100.{{sfn|Mellow|1980|pp= 41–42}} Although it received generally positive reviews, it did not sell well. He published several minor pieces in the '']''.<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/Life&Times/Family/Introduction.html| title = "Hawthorne in Salem", North Shore Community College}}</ref>

In 1836, Hawthorne served as the editor of the '']''. At the time, he boarded with poet ] on Hancock Street in Beacon Hill in ].<ref>Wineapple, 87–88</ref> He was offered an appointment as weigher and gauger at the ] at a salary of $1,500 a year, which he accepted on January 17, 1839.<ref>Miller, 169</ref> During his time there, he rented a room from ], business partner of ].<ref>Mellow, 169</ref> Hawthorne wrote in the comparative obscurity of what he called his "owl's nest" in the family home. As he looked back on this period of his life, he wrote: "I have not lived, but only dreamed about living."<ref>Letter to Longfellow, June 4, 1837.</ref> He contributed short stories to various magazines and annuals, including "]" and "]", though none drew major attention to him. ] offered to cover the risk of collecting these stories in the spring of 1837 into the volume '']'', which made Hawthorne known locally.<ref>McFarland, 22–23</ref>

===Marriage and family===
], 1830 (Peabody Essex Museum)]]
While at Bowdoin, Hawthorne wagered a bottle of ] with his friend Jonathan Cilley that Cilley would get married before Hawthorne did.<ref>Manning Hawthorne, "Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin", ''The New England Quarterly'', Vol. 13, No. 2 (June 1940): 246–279.</ref> By 1836, he had won the bet, but he did not remain a bachelor for life. He had public flirtations with Mary Silsbee and ],<ref>Cheever, 102</ref> then he began pursuing Peabody's sister, the ] and ] ]. He joined the transcendentalist ]n community at ] in 1841, not because he agreed with the experiment but because it helped him save money to marry Sophia.<ref>McFarland, 83</ref> He paid a $1,000 deposit and was put in charge of shoveling the hill of manure referred to as "the Gold Mine".<ref>Cheever, 104</ref> He left later that year, though his Brook Farm adventure became an inspiration for his novel '']''.<ref name="McFarland, 149">McFarland, 149</ref> Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody on July 9, 1842, at a ceremony in the Peabody parlor on West Street in Boston.<ref>Wineapple, 160</ref> The couple moved to ] in ],<ref>McFarland, 25</ref> where they lived for three years. His neighbor ] invited him into his social circle, but Hawthorne was almost pathologically shy and stayed silent at gatherings.<ref>Schreiner, 123</ref> At the Old Manse, Hawthorne wrote most of the tales collected in '']''.<ref>Miller, 246–247</ref>
]
Like Hawthorne, Sophia was a reclusive person. Throughout her early life, she had frequent ]s and underwent several experimental medical treatments.<ref>Mellow, 6–7</ref> She was mostly bedridden until her sister introduced her to Hawthorne, after which her headaches seem to have abated. The Hawthornes enjoyed a long and happy marriage. He referred to her as his "Dove" and wrote that she "is, in the strictest sense, my sole companion; and I need no other—there is no vacancy in my mind, any more than in my heart ... Thank God that I suffice for her boundless heart!"<ref>McFarland, 87</ref> Sophia greatly admired her husband's work. She wrote in one of her journals:
<blockquote>I am always so dazzled and bewildered with the richness, the depth, the&nbsp;... jewels of beauty in his productions that I am always looking forward to a second reading where I can ponder and muse and fully take in the miraculous wealth of thoughts.<ref>January 14, 1851, Journal of Sophia Hawthorne. Berg Collection NY Public Library.</ref></blockquote>

Poet ] came to the Old Manse for help on the first anniversary of the Hawthornes' marriage. A local teenager named Martha Hunt had drowned herself in the river and Hawthorne's boat ''Pond Lily'' was needed to find her body. Hawthorne helped recover the corpse, which he described as "a spectacle of such perfect horror&nbsp;... She was the very image of death-agony".<ref>Schreiner, 116–117</ref> The incident later inspired a scene in his novel ''The Blithedale Romance''.

The Hawthornes had three children. Their first was daughter Una, born March 3, 1844; her name was a reference to '']'', to the displeasure of family members.<ref>McFarland, 97</ref> Hawthorne wrote to a friend, "I find it a very sober and serious kind of happiness that springs from the birth of a child&nbsp;... There is no escaping it any longer. I have business on earth now, and must look about me for the means of doing it."<ref>Schreiner, 119</ref> In October 1845, the Hawthornes moved to Salem.<ref name="Reynolds, 10">Reynolds, 10</ref> In 1846, their son ] was born. Hawthorne wrote to his sister Louisa on June 22, 1846: "A small troglodyte made his appearance here at ten minutes to six o'clock this morning, who claimed to be your nephew."<ref>Mellow, 273</ref> Daughter ] was born in May 1851, and Hawthorne called her his "autumnal flower".<ref>Miller, 343–344</ref>

===Middle years===
] of Hawthorne, ], 1848]]
In April 1846, Hawthorne was officially appointed the Surveyor for the District of Salem and Beverly and Inspector of the Revenue for the Port of Salem at an annual salary of $1,200.<ref>Miller, 242</ref> He had difficulty writing during this period, as he admitted to Longfellow:

<blockquote>I am trying to resume my pen&nbsp;... Whenever I sit alone, or walk alone, I find myself dreaming about stories, as of old; but these forenoons in the Custom House undo all that the afternoons and evenings have done. I should be happier if I could write.<ref>Miller, 265</ref></blockquote>

This employment, like his earlier appointment to the custom house in Boston, was vulnerable to the politics of the ]. Hawthorne was a Democrat and lost this job due to the change of administration in Washington after the presidential election of 1848. He wrote a letter of protest to the ''Boston Daily Advertiser'', which was attacked by the ] and supported by the Democrats, making Hawthorne's dismissal a much-talked about event in New England.<ref>Cheever, 179</ref> He was deeply affected by the death of his mother in late July, calling it "the darkest hour I ever lived".<ref>Cheever, 180</ref> He was appointed the corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum in 1848. Guests who came to speak that season included Emerson, Thoreau, ], and ].<ref>Miller, 264–265</ref>

Hawthorne returned to writing and published '']'' in mid-March 1850,<ref>Miller, 300</ref> including a preface that refers to his three-year tenure in the Custom House and makes several allusions to local politicians—who did not appreciate their treatment.<ref>Mellow, 316</ref> It was one of the first mass-produced books in America, selling 2,500 volumes within ten days and earning Hawthorne $1,500 over 14 years.<ref name=McFarland136>McFarland, 136</ref> The book became a best-seller in the United States<ref>Cheever, 181</ref> and initiated his most lucrative period as a writer.<ref name=McFarland136/> Hawthorne's friend ] objected to the novel's "morbid intensity" and its dense psychological details, writing that the book "is therefore apt to become, like Hawthorne, too painfully anatomical in his exhibition of them",<ref>Miller, 301–302</ref> while 20th-century writer ] said that there could be no more perfect work of the American imagination than ''The Scarlet Letter''.<ref>Miller, 284</ref>

Hawthorne and his family moved to a small red farmhouse near ], at the end of March 1850.<ref>Miller, 274</ref> He became friends with ] beginning on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend.<ref>Cheever, 96</ref> Melville had just read Hawthorne's short story collection '']'', and his unsigned review of the collection was printed in '']'' on August 17 and August 24 titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses".<ref>Miller, 312</ref> Melville wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black".<ref name=Mellow335>Mellow, 335</ref> He was composing his novel '']'' at the time,<ref name=Mellow335/> and dedicated the work in 1851 to Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne."<ref>Mellow, 382</ref>

Hawthorne's time in the ] was very productive.<ref name=Wright93>Wright, John Hardy. ''Hawthorne's Haunts in New England''. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2008: 93. {{ISBN|978-1596294257}}</ref> While there, he wrote '']'' (1851), which poet and critic ] said was better than ''The Scarlet Letter'' and called "the most valuable contribution to New England history that has been made."<ref>Mellow, 368–369</ref> He also wrote '']'' (1852), his only work written in the first person.<ref name="McFarland, 149"/> He also published '']'' in 1851, a collection of short stories retelling myths that he had been thinking about writing since 1846.<ref>Miller, 345</ref> Nevertheless, poet ] reported that Hawthorne "has suffered much living in this place".<ref>Wineapple, 241</ref> The family enjoyed the scenery of the Berkshires, although Hawthorne did not enjoy the winters in their small house. They left on November 21, 1851.<ref name=Wright93/> Hawthorne noted, "I am sick to death of Berkshire&nbsp;... I have felt languid and dispirited, during almost my whole residence."<ref>Wineapple, 242</ref>

===The Wayside and Europe===
{{external media | width = 210px | float = right | headerimage= | video1 = , ]}}
In May 1852, the Hawthornes returned to Concord where they lived until July 1853.<ref name="Reynolds, 10"/> In February, they bought The Hillside, a home previously inhabited by ] and his family, and renamed it ].<ref>McFarland, 129–130</ref> Their neighbors in Concord included Emerson and ].<ref>McFarland, 182</ref> That year, Hawthorne wrote ''The Life of Franklin Pierce'', the campaign biography of his friend, which depicted him as "a man of peaceful pursuits".<ref name=Miller381>Miller, 381</ref> ] said, "If he makes out Pierce to be a great man or a brave man, it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote."<ref name=Miller381/> In the biography, Hawthorne depicts Pierce as a statesman and soldier who had accomplished no great feats because of his need to make "little noise" and so "withdrew into the background".<ref>Schreiner, 170–171</ref> He also left out Pierce's drinking habits, despite rumors of his alcoholism,<ref>Mellow, 412</ref> and emphasized Pierce's belief that slavery could not "be remedied by human contrivances" but would, over time, "vanish like a dream".<ref>Miller, 382–383</ref>

]]]
With Pierce's election as ], Hawthorne was rewarded in 1853 with the position of United States ] in ] shortly after the publication of '']''.<ref>McFarland, 186</ref> The role was considered the most lucrative foreign service position at the time, described by Hawthorne's wife as "second in dignity to the Embassy in London".<ref>Mellow, 415</ref> During this period he and his family lived in the Rock Park estate in ] in one of the houses directly adjacent to Tranmere Beach on the Wirral shore of the River Mersey.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Urquhart|first=Peter|date=Spring 2011|title=Nathaniel Hawthorne's Home in Rock Park|url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.37.1.0133|jstor=10.5325/nathhawtrevi.37.1.0133|journal=Nathaniel Hawthorne Review|volume=37|issue=1|pages=133–142|access-date=2020-11-09}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last=Shaw|first=George|date=1906|title=Nathaniel Hawthorne's House in Rock Park (Letter dated 1903-11-14 to the Liverpool Mercury)|url=https://www.hslc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/58-9-Shaw.pdf|journal=Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire|volume=58|pages=109–112|access-date=2020-11-09}}</ref> Thus to attend his place of employment at the United States consulate in Liverpool, Hawthorne would have been a regular passenger on the steamboat operated Rock Ferry to Liverpool ferry service departing from the Rock Ferry Slipway at the end of Bedford Road.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1391991|title=Rock Ferry Slipway |author=<!--Not stated--> |date=2007-06-04 |website=Historic England |access-date=2020-11-09}}</ref> His appointment ended in 1857 at the close of the ]. The Hawthorne family toured France and Italy until 1860. During his time in Italy, the previously clean-shaven Hawthorne grew a bushy mustache.<ref>McFarland, 210</ref>

The family returned to The Wayside in 1860,<ref>McFarland, 206</ref> and that year saw the publication of '']'', his first new book in seven years.<ref>Mellow, 520</ref> Hawthorne admitted that he had aged considerably, referring to himself as "wrinkled with time and trouble".<ref>Schreiner, 207</ref>

===Later years and death===
]

At the outset of the ], Hawthorne traveled with ] to Washington, D.C., where he met ] and other notable figures. He wrote about his experiences in the essay "]" in 1862.

Failing health prevented him from completing several more romance novels. Hawthorne was suffering from pain in his stomach and insisted on a recuperative trip with his friend Franklin Pierce, though his neighbor Bronson Alcott was concerned that Hawthorne was too ill.<ref>Wineapple, 372</ref> While on a tour of the ], he died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, in ]. Pierce sent a ] to ] asking her to inform Mrs. Hawthorne in person. Mrs. Hawthorne was too saddened by the news to handle the funeral arrangements herself.<ref>Miller, 518</ref> Hawthorne's son Julian, a freshman at ], learned of his father's death the next day; coincidentally, he was initiated into the ] fraternity on the same day by being blindfolded and placed in a coffin.<ref>{{cite web| title= Nathaniel Hawthorne's Untold Tale | url= http://chronicle.com/article/Nathaniel-Hawthornes-Untold/123889 | first= Jack | last=Matthews | date= August 15, 2010 | work= ] | access-date=2010-08-17}}</ref> Longfellow wrote a tribute poem to Hawthorne published in 1866 called "]".<ref>Wagenknecht, Edward. ''Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist''. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966: 9.</ref> Hawthorne was buried on what is now known as "Authors' Ridge" in ], ].<ref>Wilson, Scott. ''Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons'', 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 20433–20434). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.</ref> Pallbearers included Longfellow, Emerson, Alcott, ], ], and ].<ref>Baker, Carlos. ''Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait''. New York: Viking Press, 1996: 448. {{ISBN|067086675X}}.</ref> Emerson wrote of the funeral: "I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more fully rendered—in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, & he died of it."<ref>McFarland, 297</ref>

His wife Sophia and daughter Una were originally buried in England. However, in June 2006, they were reinterred in plots adjacent to Hawthorne.<ref>Mishra, Raja and Sally Heaney. "", ''The Boston Globe''. June 1, 2006. Accessed July 4, 2008</ref>

==Writings==
] and dedicated in 1925]]
]'s 1861 photograph of Hawthorne which inspired the sculpture<ref>Gollin, Rita K. ''Portraits of Nathaniel Hawthorne''. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983: 85. {{ISBN|0875800874}}</ref>]]
Hawthorne had a particularly close relationship with his publishers ] and ].<ref>Madison, 9</ref> Hawthorne once told Fields, "I care more for your good opinion than for that of a host of critics."<ref>Miller, 281</ref> In fact, it was Fields who convinced Hawthorne to turn ''The Scarlet Letter'' into a novel rather than a short story.<ref>Charvat, William. ''Literary Publishing in America: 1790–1850''. Amherst, MA: The ], 1993 (first published 1959): 56. {{ISBN|0870238019}}</ref> Ticknor handled many of Hawthorne's personal matters, including the purchase of cigars, overseeing financial accounts, and even purchasing clothes.<ref>Madison, 15</ref> Ticknor died with Hawthorne at his side in Philadelphia in 1864; according to a friend, Hawthorne was left "apparently dazed".<ref>Miller, 513–514</ref>

===Literary style and themes===
{{Further|Romance (literary fiction)}}

Hawthorne's works belong to ] or, more specifically, ],<ref>Reynolds, David S. ''Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988: 524. {{ISBN|0674065654}}</ref> cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity.<ref>Wayne, Tiffany K. "Nathaniel Hawthorne", ''Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism''. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2006: 140. {{ISBN|0816056269}}.</ref> Many of his works are inspired by Puritan ],<ref>Bell, Michael Davitt. ''Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England''. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980: 173. {{ISBN|069106136X}}</ref> combining historical romance loaded with symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism.<ref>Howe, Daniel Walker. ''What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848''. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007: 633. {{ISBN|978-0195078947}}.</ref> His depictions of the past are a version of historical fiction used only as a vehicle to express common themes of ancestral sin, guilt and retribution.<ref>Crews, 28–29</ref> His later writings also reflect his negative view of the ] movement.<ref>Galens, David, ed. ''Literary Movements for Students'', Vol. 1. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2002: 319. {{ISBN|0787665177}}</ref>

Hawthorne was predominantly a short story writer in his early career. Upon publishing ''Twice-Told Tales'', however, he noted, "I do not think much of them," and he expected little response from the public.<ref>Miller, 104</ref> His four major ] were written between 1850 and 1860: '']'' (1850), '']'' (1851), '']'' (1852) and '']'' (1860). Another novel-length romance, '']'', was published anonymously in 1828. Hawthorne defined a romance as being radically different from a novel by not being concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience.<ref>Porte, 95</ref> In the preface to ''The House of the Seven Gables'', Hawthorne describes his romance-writing as using "atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture".<ref>Wineapple, 237</ref> The picture, Daniel Hoffman found, was one of "the primitive energies of fecundity and creation."<ref>Hoffman, 356</ref>

Critics have applied ] and ] to Hawthorne's depictions of women. Feminist scholars are interested particularly in ]: they recognize that while she herself could not be the "destined prophetess" of the future, the "angel and apostle of the coming revelation" must nevertheless "be a woman."<ref>''The Scarlet Letter'' Ch XXIV "Conclusion"</ref> ] saw Hester as mystical, "a wandering goddess still bearing the mark of her Asiatic origins&nbsp;... moving serenely in the magic circle of her sexual nature".<ref>Paglia, ''Sexual Personae'', 581, 583</ref> Lauren Berlant termed Hester "the citizen as woman love as a quality of the body that contains the purest light of nature," her resulting "traitorous political theory" a "Female Symbolic" literalization of futile Puritan metaphors.<ref>Berlant, ''The Anatomy of National Fantasy'', 94, 148, 175</ref> Historicists view Hester as a ] and avatar of the self-reliance and responsibility that led to women's suffrage and sometime-reproductive emancipation. Anthony Splendora found her literary genealogy among other archetypally fallen but redeemed women, both historic and mythic. As examples, he offers ] of ancient legend; ] of twelfth-century France's tragedy involving world-renowned philosopher ]; ] (America's first heretic, circa 1636), and Hawthorne family friend ].<ref>Splendora, "Psyche and Hester", 2, 5, 18</ref> In Hester's first appearance, Hawthorne likens her, "infant at her bosom", to Mary, Mother of Jesus, "the image of Divine Maternity". In her study of Victorian literature, in which such "galvanic outcasts" as Hester feature prominently, ] went so far as to name Hester's fall and subsequent redemption, "the novel's one unequivocally religious activity".<ref>Auerbach, ''Woman and the Demon'', 150, 166</ref> Regarding Hester as a deity figure, Meredith A. Powers found in Hester's characterization "the earliest in American fiction that the archetypal Goddess appears quite graphically," like a Goddess "not the wife of traditional marriage, permanently subject to a male overlord"; Powers noted "her syncretism, her flexibility, her inherent ability to alter and so avoid the defeat of secondary status in a goal-oriented civilization".<ref>Powers, ''The Heroine in Western Literature,'' 144</ref>

Aside from Hester Prynne, the model women of Hawthorne's other novels—from Ellen Langton of ''Fanshawe'' to Zenobia and Priscilla of ''The Blithedale Romance,'' Hilda and Miriam of ''The Marble Faun'' and Phoebe and Hepzibah of ''The House of the Seven Gables''—are more fully realized than his male characters, who merely orbit them.<ref>Splendora, "Psyche and Hester", 12</ref> This observation is equally true of his short-stories, in which central females serve as allegorical figures: Rappaccini's beautiful but life-altering, garden-bound, daughter; almost-perfect Georgiana of "]"; the sinned-against (abandoned) Ester of "Ethan Brand"; and ] Faith Brown, linchpin of Young Goodman Brown's very belief in God. "My Faith is gone!" Brown exclaims in despair upon seeing his wife at the Witches' Sabbath.{{citation needed|date=May 2016}} Perhaps the most sweeping statement of Hawthorne's impetus comes from ]: "Somewhere, if not in the New England of his time, Hawthorne unearthed the image of a goddess supreme in beauty and power."<ref>Van Doren 19</ref>

Hawthorne also wrote nonfiction. In 2008, the ] selected Hawthorne's "A show of wax-figures" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.<ref>, Library of America website, accessed Jan 30, 2018</ref>

===Critical reception===
Hawthorne's writings were well received at the time. Contemporary response praised his sentimentality and moral purity while more modern evaluations focus on the dark psychological complexity.<ref>Person, Leland S. "Bibliographical Essay: Hawthorne and History", collected in ''A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne''. Oxford University Press, 2001: 187. {{ISBN|0195124146}}.</ref> Herman Melville wrote a passionate review of ''Mosses from an Old Manse'', titled "]", arguing that Hawthorne "is one of the new, and far better generation of your writers." Melville describes an affinity for Hawthorne that would only increase: "I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul."<ref>"" ] August 1850.</ref> ] wrote important reviews of both ''Twice-Told Tales'' and ''Mosses from an Old Manse''. Poe's assessment was partly informed by his contempt for allegory and moral tales, and his chronic accusations of plagiarism, though he admitted:
<blockquote>The style of Mr. Hawthorne is purity itself. His tone is singularly effective—wild, plaintive, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his themes&nbsp;... We look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth.<ref>McFarland, 88–89</ref></blockquote> ]'s magazine '']'' published the first substantial public praise of Hawthorne, saying in 1828 that the author of ''Fanshawe'' has a "fair prospect of future success."<ref>{{Cite book | publisher = University of Chicago Press | isbn = 0226469697 | last = Lease | first = Benjamin | title = That Wild Fellow John Neal and the American Literary Revolution | location = Chicago | year = 1972 | pages = 129, 133}}</ref> ] wrote, "Nathaniel Hawthorne's reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man."<ref>Nelson, Randy F. (editor). ''The Almanac of American Letters''. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 150. {{ISBN|086576008X}}.</ref> ] praised Hawthorne, saying, "The fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it."<ref>Porte, 97</ref> Poet ] wrote that he admired the "weird and subtle beauty" in Hawthorne's tales.<ref>Woodwell, Roland H. ''John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography''. Haverhill, Massachusetts: Trustees of the John Greenleaf Whittier Homestead, 1985: 293.</ref> ] said of Hawthorne, "Of the American writers destined to live, he is the most original, the one least indebted to foreign models or literary precedents of any kind."<ref>McFarland, 88</ref>

Beginning in the 1950s, critics have focused on symbolism and didacticism.<ref>Crews, 4</ref>

The critic ] wrote that only Henry James and ] challenge Hawthorne's position as the greatest American novelist, although he admitted that he favored James as the greatest American novelist.<ref>''Nathaniel Hawthorne'' by Harold Bloom (2000) p. 9<!-- is this: ''Nathaniel Hawthorne (Bloom's Classic Critical Views)'' https://www.amazon.com/Nathaniel-Hawthorne-Classic-Critical-Hardcover/dp/B00E86IPQS ... is this: ''Nathaniel Hawthorne'' isbn=978-0791052532 http://www.booksamillion.com/p/Nathaniel-Hawthorne/Harold-Bloom-Ed/9780791052532?id=6189791745486 ? --></ref><ref name="ReferenceA">Nathaniel Hawthorne by Harold Bloom p. xii <!-- see comment above which book is this? --></ref> Bloom saw Hawthorne's greatest works to be principally ''The Scarlet Letter'', followed by ''The Marble Faun'' and certain short stories, including "My Kinsman, Major Molineux", "Young Goodman Brown", "Wakefield", and "Feathertop".<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

==Selected works==
] myth, from '']''. Illustration by ] for the 1893 edition.]]
According to Hawthorne scholar ], the "definitive edition"<ref>Rita K. Gollin, , ] Online Feb. 2000</ref> of Hawthorne's works is ''The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne'', edited by William Charvat and others, published by The ] in twenty-three volumes between 1962 and 1997.<ref>{{cite book |last = Hawthorne |first = Nathaniel |year = 1962|title = The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne |url = https://archive.org/details/centenaryedition0008hawt |url-access = registration |publisher = Ohio State University Press| location = Columbus|isbn = 978-0814200599|ref = none|oclc = 274693 }}</ref> ''Tales and Sketches'' (1982) was the second volume to be published in the ], ''Collected Novels'' (1983) the tenth.<ref>{{cite web| url = https://www.loa.org/books/loa_collection| title = Library of America Series}}</ref>

===Novels===
* '']'' (published anonymously, 1828)<ref>Publication info on books from to ''The Scarlet Letter'' by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Page Books, accessed June 11, 2007.</ref>
* '']'' (1850)
* '']'' (1851)
* '']'' (1852)
* '']'' (1860) (as ''Transformation: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni'', UK publication, same year)
* ''The Dolliver Romance'' (1863) (unfinished)
* ''Septimius Felton; or, the Elixir of Life'' (unfinished, published in the '']'', 1872)
* ''Doctor Grimshawe's Secret: A Romance'' (unfinished, with preface and notes by Julian Hawthorne, 1882)

===Short story collections===
* '']'' (1837)
* ''Legends of the Province House'' (1838–1839)
* ''Grandfather's Chair'' (1840)
* '']'' (1846)
* '']'' (1851)
* '']'' (1852)
* '']'' (1853)
* ''The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces'' (1876)
* ''The Great Stone Face and Other Tales of the White Mountains'' (1889)

===Selected short stories===
* "]" (1830)
* "]" (1832)
* "]" (1832)
* "]" (1835)
* "]" (1835)
* "The White Old Maid" (1835)
* "Wakefield" (1835)
* "]" (1835)
* "]" (1836)
* "]" (1837)
* "]" (1837)
* "]" (1837)
* "]" (1837)
* "]" (May 1842)
* "]" (March 1843)
* "]" (1843)
* "]" (1843)
* "Earth's Holocaust" (1844)
* "]" (1844)
* "]" (1845)
* "]" (1846)
* "Fire Worship" (1846)
* "]" (1850)
* "]" (1850)
* "]" (1852)

===Nonfiction===
* ''Life of Franklin Pierce'' (1852)
* ''Our Old Home'' (1863)
* ''Passages from the English Note-Books'' (1870)
* ''Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books'' (1871)
* ''Passages from the American Note-Books'' (1879)
* ''Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny, a Diary'' (written 1851, published 1904), an excerpt from ''Passages from the American Note-Books''.

==See also==
{{Portal|Biography|Children's literature|Politics}}
* ]
* ]
{{clear}}

==References==
===Notes===
{{Reflist|21em}}

===Sources===
{{refbegin|20em}}
* Auerbach, Nina, ''Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth'' (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1982)
* Berlant, Lauren. ''The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life'' (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1991)
* Cheever, Susan. ''American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work''. Detroit: Thorndike Press, 2006. Large print edition. {{ISBN|078629521X}}.
* Crews, Frederick. ''The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966; reprinted 1989. {{ISBN|0520068173}}.
* Hoffman, Daniel G. ''Form and Fable in American Fiction.'' University of Virginia Press 1994.
* Madison, Charles A. ''Irving to Irving: Author-Publisher Relations 1800–1974''. New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1974.
* McFarland, Philip. ''Hawthorne in Concord''. New York: Grove Press, 2004. {{ISBN|0802117767}}.
* {{cite book | last =Mellow | first =James R. | author-link = | title =Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times | year =1980 | publisher =Houghton Mifflin | location =Boston | isbn =0395276020 }}
* Miller, Edwin Haviland. ''Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne''. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. {{ISBN|0877453322}}.
* Paglia, Camille. ''Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson'' (New York: Vintage 1991)
* Porte, Joel. ''The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James''. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969.
* Powers, Meredith A. ''The Heroine in Western Literature: The Archetype and Her Reemergence in Modern Prose'' (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland 1991)
* Reynolds, Larry J. "Hawthorne's Labors in Concord". ''The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne''. Edited by Richard H. Millington. Cambridge, UK; New York; and Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 2004. {{ISBN|052180745X}}
* Schreiner, Samuel A. Jr. ''The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the Friendship that Freed the American Mind''. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006. {{ISBN|0471646636}}.
* Splendora, Anthony. "Psyche and Hester, or Apotheosis and Epitome: Natural Grace, ''La Sagesse Naturale''", ''The Rupkatha Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities,'' Vol. 5, No. 3 (2014), pp.&nbsp;1–34 .
* Van Doren, Mark. ''Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Critical Biography''. 1949; New York: Vintage 1957.
* ]. ''Hawthorne: A Life''. Random House: New York, 2003. {{ISBN|0812972910}}.
{{refend}}

==Further reading==
* Bell, Michael Davitt. . Princeton University Press (2015).
* Forster, Sophia. "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Emergence of American Literary Realism." ''Studies in the Novel'' 48.1 (2016): 43–64.
* Greven, David. ''Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville'' (2015).
* Hallock, Thomas. "'A' is for Acronym: Teaching Hawthorne in a Performance-Based World." ''ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture'' 62#1 (2016): 116–121.
* Hawthorne, Julian. ''Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography'' (2 vols.). Cambridge University Press (1884); Boston: James R. Osgood and Company (1885).
* Hawthorne, Julian. ''Hawthorne and His Circle''. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers (1903).
* Hawthorne, Julian. ''The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, Edited by His Wife Edith Garrigues Hawthorne''. New York: The Macmillan Company (1938).
* {{cite book |last1=Levin |first1=Harry |title=The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville |date=1980 |publisher=Ohio University Press |location=Athens, OH |isbn=9780821405819}}
* ]. , ''The New York Review of Books'', November 21, 2024 (review of Salwak, Dale, ''The Life of the Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne'').
* Reynolds, Larry J., ed. ''A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne''. New York: Oxford University Press (2001).
* ]. ''The Life of the Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne''. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell (2022). ISBN 978-1-119-77181-4
* Scribner, David, ed. ''Hawthorne Revistied: Honoring the Bicentennial of the Author's Birth''. Lenox, Massachusetts: Lenox Library Association (2004).
* Ticknor, Caroline. ''Hawthorne and His Publisher''. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company (1913).
* Williamson, Richard Joseph. "Friendship, politics, and the literary imagination: The impact of Franklin Pierce on Hawthorne's work" (PhD dissertation, University of North Texas, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1996. 9638512).
* Young, Philip. ''Hawthorne's Secret: An Un-Told Tale''. Boston: David R. Godine (1984).

==External links==
{{Commons}}
{{Wikiquote}}
{{Wikisource author}}
* ] Hawthorne at ]
* The website
* {{ISFDB name|id=1959|name=Nathaniel Hawthorne}}
* at the University of South Carolina Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.
* , housed in the at Stanford University Libraries
* from ]'s '']''
* at ]
* ]. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
* and boyhood home in Raymond, Maine
* in Salem, Massachusetts

;Works
* {{Gutenberg author |id=28}}
* {{Internet Archive author |sname=Nathaniel Hawthorne}}
* {{Librivox author |id=11}}

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Latest revision as of 18:28, 2 December 2024

American author (1804–1864)

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne in the 1860sHawthorne in the 1860s
BornNathaniel Hathorne
(1804-07-04)July 4, 1804
Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.
DiedMay 19, 1864(1864-05-19) (aged 59)
Plymouth, New Hampshire, U.S.
Alma materBowdoin College
Spouse Sophia Peabody ​(m. 1842)
Children3, including Julian and Rose
Signature

Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.

He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that town. Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, and graduated in 1825. He published his first work in 1828, the novel Fanshawe; 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. The following year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at the Boston Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment as consul took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to Concord in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864.

Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, and many works feature moral metaphors with an anti-Puritan inspiration. His fiction 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 published works include novels, short stories, and a biography of his college friend Franklin Pierce, written for his 1852 campaign for President of the United States, which Pierce won, becoming the 14th president.

Biography

Early life

Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Charles Osgood, 1841 (Peabody Essex Museum)

Nathaniel Hathorne, as his name was originally spelled, was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts; his birthplace is preserved and open to the public. His great-great-great-grandfather, William Hathorne, was a Puritan and the first of the family to emigrate from England. He settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, before moving to Salem. There he became an important member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and held many political positions, including magistrate and judge, becoming infamous for his harsh sentencing. William's son, Hawthorne's great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was one of the judges who oversaw the Salem witch trials. Hawthorne probably added the "w" to his surname in his early twenties, shortly after graduating from college, in an effort to dissociate himself from his notorious forebears. Hawthorne's father Nathaniel Hathorne Sr. was a sea captain who died in 1808 of yellow fever in Dutch Suriname; he had been a member of the East India Marine Society. After his death, his widow moved with young Nathaniel, his older sister Elizabeth, and their younger sister Louisa to live with relatives named the Mannings in Salem, where they lived for 10 years. Young Hawthorne was hit on the leg while playing "bat and ball" on November 10, 1813, and he became lame and bedridden for a year, though several physicians could find nothing wrong with him.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's childhood home in Raymond, Maine, built in 1804

In the summer of 1816, the family lived as boarders with farmers before moving to a home recently built specifically for them by Hawthorne's uncles Richard and Robert Manning in Raymond, Maine, near Sebago Lake. Years later, Hawthorne looked back at his time in Maine fondly: "Those were delightful days, for that part of the country was wild then, with only scattered clearings, and nine tenths of it primeval woods." In 1819, he was sent back to Salem for school and soon complained of homesickness and being too far from his mother and sisters. He distributed seven issues of The Spectator to his family in August and September 1820 for fun. The homemade newspaper was written by hand and included essays, poems, and news featuring the young author's adolescent humor.

Hawthorne's uncle Robert Manning insisted that the boy attend college, despite Hawthorne's protests. With the financial support of his uncle, Hawthorne was sent to Bowdoin College in 1821, partly because of family connections in the area, and also because of its relatively inexpensive tuition rate. Hawthorne met future president Franklin Pierce on the way to Bowdoin, at the stage stop in Portland, and the two became fast friends. Once at the school, he also met future poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, future congressman Jonathan Cilley, and future naval reformer Horatio Bridge. He graduated with the class of 1825, and later described his college experience to Richard Henry Stoddard:

I was educated (as the phrase is) at Bowdoin College. I was an idle student, negligent of college rules and the Procrustean details of academic life, rather choosing to nurse my own fancies than to dig into Greek roots and be numbered among the learned Thebans.

Early career

Boston Custom House, Custom House Street, where Hawthorne worked c. 1839–40

Hawthorne's first published work, Fanshawe: A Tale, based on his experiences at Bowdoin College, appeared anonymously in October 1828, printed at the author's own expense of $100. Although it received generally positive reviews, it did not sell well. He published several minor pieces in the Salem Gazette.

In 1836, Hawthorne served as the editor of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. At the time, he boarded with poet Thomas Green Fessenden on Hancock Street in Beacon Hill in Boston. He was offered an appointment as weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House at a salary of $1,500 a year, which he accepted on January 17, 1839. During his time there, he rented a room from George Stillman Hillard, business partner of Charles Sumner. Hawthorne wrote in the comparative obscurity of what he called his "owl's nest" in the family home. As he looked back on this period of his life, he wrote: "I have not lived, but only dreamed about living." He contributed short stories to various magazines and annuals, including "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil", though none drew major attention to him. Horatio Bridge offered to cover the risk of collecting these stories in the spring of 1837 into the volume Twice-Told Tales, which made Hawthorne known locally.

Marriage and family

Portrait of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne by Chester Harding, 1830 (Peabody Essex Museum)

While at Bowdoin, Hawthorne wagered a bottle of Madeira wine with his friend Jonathan Cilley that Cilley would get married before Hawthorne did. By 1836, he had won the bet, but he did not remain a bachelor for life. He had public flirtations with Mary Silsbee and Elizabeth Peabody, then he began pursuing Peabody's sister, the illustrator and transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. He joined the transcendentalist Utopian community at Brook Farm in 1841, not because he agreed with the experiment but because it helped him save money to marry Sophia. He paid a $1,000 deposit and was put in charge of shoveling the hill of manure referred to as "the Gold Mine". He left later that year, though his Brook Farm adventure became an inspiration for his novel The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody on July 9, 1842, at a ceremony in the Peabody parlor on West Street in Boston. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where they lived for three years. His neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson invited him into his social circle, but Hawthorne was almost pathologically shy and stayed silent at gatherings. At the Old Manse, Hawthorne wrote most of the tales collected in Mosses from an Old Manse.

Una, Julian, and Rose c. 1862

Like Hawthorne, Sophia was a reclusive person. Throughout her early life, she had frequent migraines and underwent several experimental medical treatments. She was mostly bedridden until her sister introduced her to Hawthorne, after which her headaches seem to have abated. The Hawthornes enjoyed a long and happy marriage. He referred to her as his "Dove" and wrote that she "is, in the strictest sense, my sole companion; and I need no other—there is no vacancy in my mind, any more than in my heart ... Thank God that I suffice for her boundless heart!" Sophia greatly admired her husband's work. She wrote in one of her journals:

I am always so dazzled and bewildered with the richness, the depth, the ... jewels of beauty in his productions that I am always looking forward to a second reading where I can ponder and muse and fully take in the miraculous wealth of thoughts.

Poet Ellery Channing came to the Old Manse for help on the first anniversary of the Hawthornes' marriage. A local teenager named Martha Hunt had drowned herself in the river and Hawthorne's boat Pond Lily was needed to find her body. Hawthorne helped recover the corpse, which he described as "a spectacle of such perfect horror ... She was the very image of death-agony". The incident later inspired a scene in his novel The Blithedale Romance.

The Hawthornes had three children. Their first was daughter Una, born March 3, 1844; her name was a reference to The Faerie Queene, to the displeasure of family members. Hawthorne wrote to a friend, "I find it a very sober and serious kind of happiness that springs from the birth of a child ... There is no escaping it any longer. I have business on earth now, and must look about me for the means of doing it." In October 1845, the Hawthornes moved to Salem. In 1846, their son Julian was born. Hawthorne wrote to his sister Louisa on June 22, 1846: "A small troglodyte made his appearance here at ten minutes to six o'clock this morning, who claimed to be your nephew." Daughter Rose was born in May 1851, and Hawthorne called her his "autumnal flower".

Middle years

Daguerrotype of Hawthorne, Whipple & Black, 1848

In April 1846, Hawthorne was officially appointed the Surveyor for the District of Salem and Beverly and Inspector of the Revenue for the Port of Salem at an annual salary of $1,200. He had difficulty writing during this period, as he admitted to Longfellow:

I am trying to resume my pen ... Whenever I sit alone, or walk alone, I find myself dreaming about stories, as of old; but these forenoons in the Custom House undo all that the afternoons and evenings have done. I should be happier if I could write.

This employment, like his earlier appointment to the custom house in Boston, was vulnerable to the politics of the spoils system. Hawthorne was a Democrat and lost this job due to the change of administration in Washington after the presidential election of 1848. He wrote a letter of protest to the Boston Daily Advertiser, which was attacked by the Whigs and supported by the Democrats, making Hawthorne's dismissal a much-talked about event in New England. He was deeply affected by the death of his mother in late July, calling it "the darkest hour I ever lived". He was appointed the corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum in 1848. Guests who came to speak that season included Emerson, Thoreau, Louis Agassiz, and Theodore Parker.

Hawthorne returned to writing and published The Scarlet Letter in mid-March 1850, including a preface that refers to his three-year tenure in the Custom House and makes several allusions to local politicians—who did not appreciate their treatment. It was one of the first mass-produced books in America, selling 2,500 volumes within ten days and earning Hawthorne $1,500 over 14 years. The book became a best-seller in the United States and initiated his most lucrative period as a writer. Hawthorne's friend Edwin Percy Whipple objected to the novel's "morbid intensity" and its dense psychological details, writing that the book "is therefore apt to become, like Hawthorne, too painfully anatomical in his exhibition of them", while 20th-century writer D. H. Lawrence said that there could be no more perfect work of the American imagination than The Scarlet Letter.

Hawthorne and his family moved to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts, at the end of March 1850. He became friends with Herman Melville beginning on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend. Melville had just read Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse, and his unsigned review of the collection was printed in The Literary World on August 17 and August 24 titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses". Melville wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black". He was composing his novel Moby-Dick at the time, and dedicated the work in 1851 to Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne."

Hawthorne's time in the Berkshires was very productive. While there, he wrote The House of the Seven Gables (1851), which poet and critic James Russell Lowell said was better than The Scarlet Letter and called "the most valuable contribution to New England history that has been made." He also wrote The Blithedale Romance (1852), his only work written in the first person. He also published A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys in 1851, a collection of short stories retelling myths that he had been thinking about writing since 1846. Nevertheless, poet Ellery Channing reported that Hawthorne "has suffered much living in this place". The family enjoyed the scenery of the Berkshires, although Hawthorne did not enjoy the winters in their small house. They left on November 21, 1851. Hawthorne noted, "I am sick to death of Berkshire ... I have felt languid and dispirited, during almost my whole residence."

The Wayside and Europe

External videos
video icon Booknotes interview with Brenda Wineapple on Hawthorne: A Life, January 4, 2004, C-SPAN

In May 1852, the Hawthornes returned to Concord where they lived until July 1853. In February, they bought The Hillside, a home previously inhabited by Amos Bronson Alcott and his family, and renamed it The Wayside. Their neighbors in Concord included Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. That year, Hawthorne wrote The Life of Franklin Pierce, the campaign biography of his friend, which depicted him as "a man of peaceful pursuits". Horace Mann said, "If he makes out Pierce to be a great man or a brave man, it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote." In the biography, Hawthorne depicts Pierce as a statesman and soldier who had accomplished no great feats because of his need to make "little noise" and so "withdrew into the background". He also left out Pierce's drinking habits, despite rumors of his alcoholism, and emphasized Pierce's belief that slavery could not "be remedied by human contrivances" but would, over time, "vanish like a dream".

Commemorative plaque in Blackheath, London

With Pierce's election as President, Hawthorne was rewarded in 1853 with the position of United States consul in Liverpool shortly after the publication of Tanglewood Tales. The role was considered the most lucrative foreign service position at the time, described by Hawthorne's wife as "second in dignity to the Embassy in London". During this period he and his family lived in the Rock Park estate in Rock Ferry in one of the houses directly adjacent to Tranmere Beach on the Wirral shore of the River Mersey. Thus to attend his place of employment at the United States consulate in Liverpool, Hawthorne would have been a regular passenger on the steamboat operated Rock Ferry to Liverpool ferry service departing from the Rock Ferry Slipway at the end of Bedford Road. His appointment ended in 1857 at the close of the Pierce administration. The Hawthorne family toured France and Italy until 1860. During his time in Italy, the previously clean-shaven Hawthorne grew a bushy mustache.

The family returned to The Wayside in 1860, and that year saw the publication of The Marble Faun, his first new book in seven years. Hawthorne admitted that he had aged considerably, referring to himself as "wrinkled with time and trouble".

Later years and death

Grave of Nathaniel Hawthorne

At the outset of the American Civil War, Hawthorne traveled with William D. Ticknor to Washington, D.C., where he met Abraham Lincoln and other notable figures. He wrote about his experiences in the essay "Chiefly About War Matters" in 1862.

Failing health prevented him from completing several more romance novels. Hawthorne was suffering from pain in his stomach and insisted on a recuperative trip with his friend Franklin Pierce, though his neighbor Bronson Alcott was concerned that Hawthorne was too ill. While on a tour of the White Mountains, he died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Pierce sent a telegram to Elizabeth Peabody asking her to inform Mrs. Hawthorne in person. Mrs. Hawthorne was too saddened by the news to handle the funeral arrangements herself. Hawthorne's son Julian, a freshman at Harvard College, learned of his father's death the next day; coincidentally, he was initiated into the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity on the same day by being blindfolded and placed in a coffin. Longfellow wrote a tribute poem to Hawthorne published in 1866 called "The Bells of Lynn". Hawthorne was buried on what is now known as "Authors' Ridge" in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. Pallbearers included Longfellow, Emerson, Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James T. Fields, and Edwin Percy Whipple. Emerson wrote of the funeral: "I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more fully rendered—in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, & he died of it."

His wife Sophia and daughter Una were originally buried in England. However, in June 2006, they were reinterred in plots adjacent to Hawthorne.

Writings

Statue of Hawthorne in Salem, Massachusetts, by Bela Lyon Pratt and dedicated in 1925
William H. Getchell's 1861 photograph of Hawthorne which inspired the sculpture

Hawthorne had a particularly close relationship with his publishers William Ticknor and James T. Fields. Hawthorne once told Fields, "I care more for your good opinion than for that of a host of critics." In fact, it was Fields who convinced Hawthorne to turn The Scarlet Letter into a novel rather than a short story. Ticknor handled many of Hawthorne's personal matters, including the purchase of cigars, overseeing financial accounts, and even purchasing clothes. Ticknor died with Hawthorne at his side in Philadelphia in 1864; according to a friend, Hawthorne was left "apparently dazed".

Literary style and themes

Further information: Romance (literary fiction)

Hawthorne's works belong to romanticism or, more specifically, dark romanticism, cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity. Many of his works are inspired by Puritan New England, combining historical romance loaded with symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism. His depictions of the past are a version of historical fiction used only as a vehicle to express common themes of ancestral sin, guilt and retribution. His later writings also reflect his negative view of the Transcendentalism movement.

Hawthorne was predominantly a short story writer in his early career. Upon publishing Twice-Told Tales, however, he noted, "I do not think much of them," and he expected little response from the public. His four major romances were written between 1850 and 1860: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1860). Another novel-length romance, Fanshawe, was published anonymously in 1828. Hawthorne defined a romance as being radically different from a novel by not being concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience. In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne describes his romance-writing as using "atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture". The picture, Daniel Hoffman found, was one of "the primitive energies of fecundity and creation."

Critics have applied feminist perspectives and historicist approaches to Hawthorne's depictions of women. Feminist scholars are interested particularly in Hester Prynne: they recognize that while she herself could not be the "destined prophetess" of the future, the "angel and apostle of the coming revelation" must nevertheless "be a woman." Camille Paglia saw Hester as mystical, "a wandering goddess still bearing the mark of her Asiatic origins ... moving serenely in the magic circle of her sexual nature". Lauren Berlant termed Hester "the citizen as woman love as a quality of the body that contains the purest light of nature," her resulting "traitorous political theory" a "Female Symbolic" literalization of futile Puritan metaphors. Historicists view Hester as a protofeminist and avatar of the self-reliance and responsibility that led to women's suffrage and sometime-reproductive emancipation. Anthony Splendora found her literary genealogy among other archetypally fallen but redeemed women, both historic and mythic. As examples, he offers Psyche of ancient legend; Heloise of twelfth-century France's tragedy involving world-renowned philosopher Peter Abelard; Anne Hutchinson (America's first heretic, circa 1636), and Hawthorne family friend Margaret Fuller. In Hester's first appearance, Hawthorne likens her, "infant at her bosom", to Mary, Mother of Jesus, "the image of Divine Maternity". In her study of Victorian literature, in which such "galvanic outcasts" as Hester feature prominently, Nina Auerbach went so far as to name Hester's fall and subsequent redemption, "the novel's one unequivocally religious activity". Regarding Hester as a deity figure, Meredith A. Powers found in Hester's characterization "the earliest in American fiction that the archetypal Goddess appears quite graphically," like a Goddess "not the wife of traditional marriage, permanently subject to a male overlord"; Powers noted "her syncretism, her flexibility, her inherent ability to alter and so avoid the defeat of secondary status in a goal-oriented civilization".

Aside from Hester Prynne, the model women of Hawthorne's other novels—from Ellen Langton of Fanshawe to Zenobia and Priscilla of The Blithedale Romance, Hilda and Miriam of The Marble Faun and Phoebe and Hepzibah of The House of the Seven Gables—are more fully realized than his male characters, who merely orbit them. This observation is equally true of his short-stories, in which central females serve as allegorical figures: Rappaccini's beautiful but life-altering, garden-bound, daughter; almost-perfect Georgiana of "The Birth-Mark"; the sinned-against (abandoned) Ester of "Ethan Brand"; and goodwife Faith Brown, linchpin of Young Goodman Brown's very belief in God. "My Faith is gone!" Brown exclaims in despair upon seeing his wife at the Witches' Sabbath. Perhaps the most sweeping statement of Hawthorne's impetus comes from Mark Van Doren: "Somewhere, if not in the New England of his time, Hawthorne unearthed the image of a goddess supreme in beauty and power."

Hawthorne also wrote nonfiction. In 2008, the Library of America selected Hawthorne's "A show of wax-figures" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.

Critical reception

Hawthorne's writings were well received at the time. Contemporary response praised his sentimentality and moral purity while more modern evaluations focus on the dark psychological complexity. Herman Melville wrote a passionate review of Mosses from an Old Manse, titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", arguing that Hawthorne "is one of the new, and far better generation of your writers." Melville describes an affinity for Hawthorne that would only increase: "I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul." Edgar Allan Poe wrote important reviews of both Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse. Poe's assessment was partly informed by his contempt for allegory and moral tales, and his chronic accusations of plagiarism, though he admitted:

The style of Mr. Hawthorne is purity itself. His tone is singularly effective—wild, plaintive, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his themes ... We look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth.

John Neal's magazine The Yankee published the first substantial public praise of Hawthorne, saying in 1828 that the author of Fanshawe has a "fair prospect of future success." Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Nathaniel Hawthorne's reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man." Henry James praised Hawthorne, saying, "The fine thing in Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his way, he tried to become familiar with it." Poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote that he admired the "weird and subtle beauty" in Hawthorne's tales. Evert Augustus Duyckinck said of Hawthorne, "Of the American writers destined to live, he is the most original, the one least indebted to foreign models or literary precedents of any kind."

Beginning in the 1950s, critics have focused on symbolism and didacticism.

The critic Harold Bloom wrote that only Henry James and William Faulkner challenge Hawthorne's position as the greatest American novelist, although he admitted that he favored James as the greatest American novelist. Bloom saw Hawthorne's greatest works to be principally The Scarlet Letter, followed by The Marble Faun and certain short stories, including "My Kinsman, Major Molineux", "Young Goodman Brown", "Wakefield", and "Feathertop".

Selected works

The Midas myth, from A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. Illustration by Walter Crane for the 1893 edition.

According to Hawthorne scholar Rita K. Gollin, the "definitive edition" of Hawthorne's works is The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by William Charvat and others, published by The Ohio State University Press in twenty-three volumes between 1962 and 1997. Tales and Sketches (1982) was the second volume to be published in the Library of America, Collected Novels (1983) the tenth.

Novels

Short story collections

Selected short stories

Nonfiction

  • Life of Franklin Pierce (1852)
  • Our Old Home (1863)
  • Passages from the English Note-Books (1870)
  • Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books (1871)
  • Passages from the American Note-Books (1879)
  • Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny, a Diary (written 1851, published 1904), an excerpt from Passages from the American Note-Books.

See also

References

Notes

  1. Who Belongs To Phi Beta Kappa Archived January 3, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, Phi Beta Kappa website, accessed Oct 4, 2009
  2. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1828). Fanshawe. Boston: Marsh & Capen. ISBN 9781404713475.
  3. Haas, Irvin. Historic Homes of American Authors. Washington, DC: The Preservation Press, 1991: 118. ISBN 0891331808.
  4. Miller, 20–21
  5. McFarland, 18
  6. Wineapple, 20–21
  7. Edward B. Hungerford (1933). "Hawthorne Gossips about Salem". New England Quarterly. 6 (3): 445–469. doi:10.2307/359552. JSTOR 359552.
  8. McFarland, 17
  9. Miller, 47
  10. Mellow, 18
  11. Glassford, Martha Watkins and Pamela Watkins Grant. Raymond and Casco. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2001: 11. ISBN 978-0-7385-7398-4
  12. Mellow, 20
  13. Miller, 50
  14. Mellow, 21
  15. Mellow, 22
  16. Miller, 57
  17. ^ Edwards, Herbert. "Nathaniel Hawthorne in Maine Archived December 28, 2019, at the Wayback Machine", Downeast Magazine, 1962
  18. Wineapple, 44–45
  19. Cheever, 99
  20. Miller, 76
  21. George Edwin Jepson. "Hawthorne in the Boston Custom House". The Bookman. August 1904.
  22. Mellow 1980, pp. 41–42.
  23. ""Hawthorne in Salem", North Shore Community College".
  24. Wineapple, 87–88
  25. Miller, 169
  26. Mellow, 169
  27. Letter to Longfellow, June 4, 1837.
  28. McFarland, 22–23
  29. Manning Hawthorne, "Nathaniel Hawthorne at Bowdoin", The New England Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2 (June 1940): 246–279.
  30. Cheever, 102
  31. McFarland, 83
  32. Cheever, 104
  33. ^ McFarland, 149
  34. Wineapple, 160
  35. McFarland, 25
  36. Schreiner, 123
  37. Miller, 246–247
  38. Mellow, 6–7
  39. McFarland, 87
  40. January 14, 1851, Journal of Sophia Hawthorne. Berg Collection NY Public Library.
  41. Schreiner, 116–117
  42. McFarland, 97
  43. Schreiner, 119
  44. ^ Reynolds, 10
  45. Mellow, 273
  46. Miller, 343–344
  47. Miller, 242
  48. Miller, 265
  49. Cheever, 179
  50. Cheever, 180
  51. Miller, 264–265
  52. Miller, 300
  53. Mellow, 316
  54. ^ McFarland, 136
  55. Cheever, 181
  56. Miller, 301–302
  57. Miller, 284
  58. Miller, 274
  59. Cheever, 96
  60. Miller, 312
  61. ^ Mellow, 335
  62. Mellow, 382
  63. ^ Wright, John Hardy. Hawthorne's Haunts in New England. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2008: 93. ISBN 978-1596294257
  64. Mellow, 368–369
  65. Miller, 345
  66. Wineapple, 241
  67. Wineapple, 242
  68. McFarland, 129–130
  69. McFarland, 182
  70. ^ Miller, 381
  71. Schreiner, 170–171
  72. Mellow, 412
  73. Miller, 382–383
  74. McFarland, 186
  75. Mellow, 415
  76. Urquhart, Peter (Spring 2011). "Nathaniel Hawthorne's Home in Rock Park". Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. 37 (1): 133–142. JSTOR 10.5325/nathhawtrevi.37.1.0133. Retrieved November 9, 2020.
  77. Shaw, George (1906). "Nathaniel Hawthorne's House in Rock Park (Letter dated 1903-11-14 to the Liverpool Mercury)" (PDF). Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire. 58: 109–112. Retrieved November 9, 2020.
  78. "Rock Ferry Slipway". Historic England. June 4, 2007. Retrieved November 9, 2020.
  79. McFarland, 210
  80. McFarland, 206
  81. Mellow, 520
  82. Schreiner, 207
  83. Wineapple, 372
  84. Miller, 518
  85. Matthews, Jack (August 15, 2010). "Nathaniel Hawthorne's Untold Tale". The Chronicle Review. Retrieved August 17, 2010.
  86. Wagenknecht, Edward. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Portrait of an American Humanist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966: 9.
  87. Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 20433–20434). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
  88. Baker, Carlos. Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. New York: Viking Press, 1996: 448. ISBN 067086675X.
  89. McFarland, 297
  90. Mishra, Raja and Sally Heaney. "Hawthornes to be reunited", The Boston Globe. June 1, 2006. Accessed July 4, 2008
  91. Gollin, Rita K. Portraits of Nathaniel Hawthorne. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983: 85. ISBN 0875800874
  92. Madison, 9
  93. Miller, 281
  94. Charvat, William. Literary Publishing in America: 1790–1850. Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993 (first published 1959): 56. ISBN 0870238019
  95. Madison, 15
  96. Miller, 513–514
  97. Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988: 524. ISBN 0674065654
  98. Wayne, Tiffany K. "Nathaniel Hawthorne", Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2006: 140. ISBN 0816056269.
  99. Bell, Michael Davitt. Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980: 173. ISBN 069106136X
  100. Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007: 633. ISBN 978-0195078947.
  101. Crews, 28–29
  102. Galens, David, ed. Literary Movements for Students, Vol. 1. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2002: 319. ISBN 0787665177
  103. Miller, 104
  104. Porte, 95
  105. Wineapple, 237
  106. Hoffman, 356
  107. The Scarlet Letter Ch XXIV "Conclusion"
  108. Paglia, Sexual Personae, 581, 583
  109. Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy, 94, 148, 175
  110. Splendora, "Psyche and Hester", 2, 5, 18
  111. Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 150, 166
  112. Powers, The Heroine in Western Literature, 144
  113. Splendora, "Psyche and Hester", 12
  114. Van Doren 19
  115. True Crime: An American Anthology, Library of America website, accessed Jan 30, 2018
  116. Person, Leland S. "Bibliographical Essay: Hawthorne and History", collected in A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Oxford University Press, 2001: 187. ISBN 0195124146.
  117. "Hawthorne and His Mosses" The Literary World August 1850.
  118. McFarland, 88–89
  119. Lease, Benjamin (1972). That Wild Fellow John Neal and the American Literary Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 129, 133. ISBN 0226469697.
  120. Nelson, Randy F. (editor). The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 150. ISBN 086576008X.
  121. Porte, 97
  122. Woodwell, Roland H. John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography. Haverhill, Massachusetts: Trustees of the John Greenleaf Whittier Homestead, 1985: 293.
  123. McFarland, 88
  124. Crews, 4
  125. Nathaniel Hawthorne by Harold Bloom (2000) p. 9
  126. ^ Nathaniel Hawthorne by Harold Bloom p. xii
  127. Rita K. Gollin, Hawthorne, Nathaniel, American National Biography Online Feb. 2000
  128. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1962). The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. ISBN 978-0814200599. OCLC 274693.
  129. "Library of America Series".
  130. Publication info on books from Editor's Note to The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Page Books, accessed June 11, 2007.

Sources

  • Auerbach, Nina, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1982)
  • Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1991)
  • Cheever, Susan. American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press, 2006. Large print edition. ISBN 078629521X.
  • Crews, Frederick. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966; reprinted 1989. ISBN 0520068173.
  • Hoffman, Daniel G. Form and Fable in American Fiction. University of Virginia Press 1994.
  • Madison, Charles A. Irving to Irving: Author-Publisher Relations 1800–1974. New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1974.
  • McFarland, Philip. Hawthorne in Concord. New York: Grove Press, 2004. ISBN 0802117767.
  • Mellow, James R. (1980). Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0395276020.
  • Miller, Edwin Haviland. Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. ISBN 0877453322.
  • Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York: Vintage 1991)
  • Porte, Joel. The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969.
  • Powers, Meredith A. The Heroine in Western Literature: The Archetype and Her Reemergence in Modern Prose (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland 1991)
  • Reynolds, Larry J. "Hawthorne's Labors in Concord". The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Edited by Richard H. Millington. Cambridge, UK; New York; and Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 052180745X
  • Schreiner, Samuel A. Jr. The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the Friendship that Freed the American Mind. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006. ISBN 0471646636.
  • Splendora, Anthony. "Psyche and Hester, or Apotheosis and Epitome: Natural Grace, La Sagesse Naturale", The Rupkatha Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2014), pp. 1–34 Volume V, Number 3, 2013 – Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities.
  • Van Doren, Mark. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Critical Biography. 1949; New York: Vintage 1957.
  • Wineapple, Brenda. Hawthorne: A Life. Random House: New York, 2003. ISBN 0812972910.

Further reading

  • Bell, Michael Davitt. Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England. Princeton University Press (2015).
  • Forster, Sophia. "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Emergence of American Literary Realism." Studies in the Novel 48.1 (2016): 43–64. online
  • Greven, David. Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville (2015).
  • Hallock, Thomas. "'A' is for Acronym: Teaching Hawthorne in a Performance-Based World." ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 62#1 (2016): 116–121.
  • Hawthorne, Julian. Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography (2 vols.). Cambridge University Press (1884); Boston: James R. Osgood and Company (1885).
  • Hawthorne, Julian. Hawthorne and His Circle. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers (1903).
  • Hawthorne, Julian. The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne, Edited by His Wife Edith Garrigues Hawthorne. New York: The Macmillan Company (1938).
  • Levin, Harry (1980). The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. ISBN 9780821405819.
  • Parks, Tim. "Hawthorne's Mood Swings", The New York Review of Books, November 21, 2024 (review of Salwak, Dale, The Life of the Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne).
  • Reynolds, Larry J., ed. A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: Oxford University Press (2001).
  • Salwak, Dale. The Life of the Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell (2022). ISBN 978-1-119-77181-4
  • Scribner, David, ed. Hawthorne Revistied: Honoring the Bicentennial of the Author's Birth. Lenox, Massachusetts: Lenox Library Association (2004).
  • Ticknor, Caroline. Hawthorne and His Publisher. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company (1913).
  • Williamson, Richard Joseph. "Friendship, politics, and the literary imagination: The impact of Franklin Pierce on Hawthorne's work" (PhD dissertation, University of North Texas, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1996. 9638512).
  • Young, Philip. Hawthorne's Secret: An Un-Told Tale. Boston: David R. Godine (1984).

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