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 Nathaniel Hawthorne illustrated in an 1870 publication | |
| Born | July 4, 1804 Salem, Massachusetts, United States |
| Died | May 19, 1864 Plymouth, New Hampshire, United States |
| Occupation | Writer |
Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 - May 19, 1864) was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. He is seen as a key figure in the development of American literature for his tales of the nation's colonial history.
Biography
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, where his birthplace is now a house museum. William Hathorne, who emigrated from England in 1630, was the first of Hawthorne's ancestors to arrive in the colonies. William's son John Hathorne was one of the judges who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials. (One theory is that having learned about this, the author added the "w" to his surname in his early twenties.) Hawthorne's father, Nathaniel Hathorne, Sr., was a sea captain who died in 1808 of yellow fever, when Hawthorne was only four years old, in Raymond, Maine.
Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College at the expense of an uncle from 1821 to 1824, befriending classmates Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce. While there he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Until the publication of his Twice-Told Tales in 1837, 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." And yet it was this period of brooding and writing that had formed, as Malcolm Cowley was to describe it, "the central fact in Hawthorne's career," his "term of apprenticeship" that would eventually result in the "richly meditated fiction."
Hawthorne was hired in 1839 as a weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House. He had become engaged in the previous year to the illustrator and transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. Seeking a possible home for himself and Sophia, he joined the transcendentalist utopian community at Brook Farm in 1841; later that year, however, he left when he became dissatisfied with the experiment. (His Brook Farm adventure would prove an inspiration for his novel The Blithedale Romance.) He married Sophia in 1842; they moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where they lived for three years. There he wrote most of the tales collected in Mosses from an Old Manse. Hawthorne and his wife then moved to The Wayside, previously a home of the Alcotts. Their neighbors in Concord included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Like Hawthorne, Sophia was a reclusive person. She was bedridden with headaches until her sister introduced her to Hawthorne, after which her headaches seem to have abated. The Hawthornes enjoyed a long marriage, often taking walks in the park. Sophia greatly admired her husband's work. In one of her journals, she writes: "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."
In 1846 Hawthorne was appointed surveyor (determining the quantity and value of imported goods) at the Salem Custom House. Like his earlier appointment to the custom house in Boston, this employment was vulnerable to the politics of the spoils system. He lost this job due to the change of administration in Washington after the presidential election of 1848.
Hawthorne's career as a novelist was boosted by The Scarlet Letter in 1850, in which the preface refers to his three-year tenure in the Custom House at Salem. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) followed in quick succession.
In 1852 he wrote the campaign biography of his old friend Franklin Pierce. With Pierce's election as president, Hawthorne was rewarded in 1853 with the position of United States consul in Liverpool. In 1857 his appointment ended and the Hawthorne family toured France and Italy. They returned to The Wayside in 1860 and that year saw the publication of The Marble Faun. Failing health (which biographer Edward Miller speculates was stomach cancer) prevented him from completing several more romances. Hawthorne died in his sleep on May 19, 1864 in Plymouth, New Hampshire while on a tour of the White Mountains with Pierce. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. In June 1906 his wife Sophia and daughter Una were interred in plots adjacent to his.
Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne had three children: Una, Julian, and Rose. Una was a victim of mental illness and died young. Julian moved out west, served a jail term for embezzlement and wrote a book about his father. Rose married George Parsons Lathrop and they became Roman Catholics. After George's death, Rose became a Dominican nun. She founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne to care for victims of incurable cancer.
Writings
Hawthorne is best-known today for his many short stories (he called them "tales") and his four major romances 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.
Before publishing his first collection of tales in 1837, Hawthorne wrote scores of short stories and sketches, publishing them anonymously or pseudonymously in periodicals such as The New England Magazine and The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. (The editor of the Democratic Review, John L. O'Sullivan, was a close friend of Hawthorne's.) Furthermore, prior to gaining fame, Hawthorne wrote several highly sexual and pornographic stories for sailors under an assumed name. Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).
References
- Letter to Longfellow, June 4, 1837.
- January 14, 1851, Journal of Sophia Hawthorne. Berg Collection NY Public Library.
See also
External links
- Eldred's Hawthorne site at Eldritch Press contains all of Hawthorne's works, notes on the writings, annotated editions, and lots of other information
- The Hawthorne in Salem Website was funded in May of 2000 by a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a collaborative effort of North Shore Community College in Danvers, Massachusetts, and three Salem, Massachusetts museums with important Hawthorne collections.
- Herman Melville's appreciation, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1851)
- Henry James's book-length study, Hawthorne (1879)
- WBUR's celebration of Nathaniel Hawthorne at 200, with links to NPR's "The Connection" on Hawthorne's birthday, as well as an interview with author Phillip McFarland
- Legends of the Province House and Other Twice Told Tales, text and images
- Works by Nathaniel Hawthorne at Project Gutenberg
- American literary couple reunited after 150 years
Joanf 15:12, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
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