Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–64), was born at Salem, Mass., of a prominent Puritan family, which had spelled the name Hathorne and included a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials, who figures as the accursed founder of The House of the Seven Gables. Nathaniel's father, a sea captain, died of yellow fever in Dutch Guiana in 1808, leaving his widow to mourn him during a long life of eccentric seclusion, and this influenced her son's somber and solitary attitude. During his childhood, he read extensively in the poets and romancers, and spent an impressionable year at a remote Maine lake, after which he attended Bowdoin College, graduating in 1825. Returning to Salem, he began to write historical sketches and allegorical tales, dealing with moral conflicts in colonial New England.

In 1828 he published anonymously, at his own expense, an immature novel, Fanshawe, whose hero resembles the author at this period. The work went practically unnoticed, but interested S.G. Goodrich, who then published many of Hawthorne's stories in The Token. These were reprinted in Twice‐Told Tales (1837, enlarged 1842) and included “The Maypole of Merrymount,” “Endicott and the Red Cross,” “The Minister's Black Veil,” “Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe,” “Dr. Heidegger's Experiment,” The Gray Champion, “The Ambitious Guest,” and the Legends of the Province House, containing “Lady Eleanore's Mantle” and “Howe's Masquerade.” These tales, which the author said had “the pale tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade,” deal with the themes of guilt and secrecy, and intellectual and moral pride, and show Hawthorne's constant preoccupation with the effects of Puritanism in New England. In imaginative, allegorical fashion, he depicts the dramatic results of a Puritanism that was at the roots of the culture he knew, recognizing its decadence in his own time.

In 1836 he emerged from his seclusion at Salem to begin a career of hack writing and editing. For Goodrich he edited the monthly American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge (1836), and later compiled the popular Peter Parley's Universal History (1837), as well as writing such books for children as Grandfather's Chair (1841), Famous Old People (1841), Liberty Tree (1841), and Biographical Stories for Children (1842). Meanwhile he had also been employed in the Boston Custom House (1839–41), and now spent six or seven months at Brook Farm, where his sensitiveness and solitary habits, as well as his lack of enthusiasm for communal living, unfitted him for fruitful participation. He married Sophia Peabody, an ardent follower of the Concord school, but even this marriage, although it was a happy turning point in his life, did not bring Hawthorne to share the optimistic philosophy of Transcendentalism. Settling in Concord at the Old Manse, he continued his analysis of the Puritan mind in the tales that were collected in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), including “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Celestial Railroad,” “Rappaccini's Daughter,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” “The Birthmark,” and “Roger Malvin's Burial.”

As Surveyor of the Port of Salem (1846–49), he wrote little, but satirically observed his associates, as he described in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850). This novel, written after Hawthorne's dismissal from his post owing to a change of administrations, proved to be his greatest work, and indeed summed up in classic terms the Puritan dilemma that had so long occupied his imagination. Other books of this period include The House of the Seven Gables (1851), another great romance, concerned with the decadence of Puritanism; The Blithedale Romance (1852), in which he turned to the contemporary scene and his Brook Farm experiences; The Snow‐Image and Other Twice‐Told Tales (1851), containing “The Snow‐Image,” “The Great Stone Face,” and “Ethan Brand”; and A Wonder Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), stories for children.

During these years, he lived for a time in the Berkshires, where he was friendly with his admirer, Melville. After he wrote a campaign biography of his college friend Franklin Pierce (1852) he was rewarded with the consulship at Liverpool. His departure for Europe (1853) marks another turning point in his life. The ensuing years abroad were filled with sightseeing and keeping a journal, and, although his new cultural acquirements had little influence on his writing, they throw significant light on his character of mind. After his consular term (1853–57), he spent two years in Italy, returning to settle again in Concord (1860). Our Old Home (1863), shrewd essays on his observations in England, and The Marble Faun (1860), a romance set in Italy, were results of his European residence.

His last years, during which he continued to contribute to the Atlantic Monthly, were marked by declining creative powers. His attempts to write a romance based on the themes of an elixir of life and an American claimant to an English estate resulted only in four posthumous fragments: Septimius Felton (1872); The Dolliver Romance (1876); Dr. Grimshawe's Secret (1883); and The Ancestral Footstep (1883). Other posthumous publications include Passages from the American Notebooks (1868), Passages from the English Notebooks (1870), and Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks (1871), all edited by his wife. The English Notebooks were newly edited from original manuscripts (1942) by Randall Stewart.

Hawthorne has long been recognized as a classic interpreter of the spiritual history of New England, and in many of his short works, as well as in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, he wrote masterpieces of romantic fiction. Like Poe, but with an emphasis on moral significance, he was a leader in the development of the short story as a distinctive American genre. The philosophic attitude implicit in his writing is generally pessimistic, growing out of the Puritan background, although his use of the supernatural has an aesthetic rather than a religious foundation, for he presented New England's early Puritanism and its decay in terms of romantic fiction. Emphasis on allegory and symbolism causes his characters to be recalled as the embodiment of psychological traits or moral concepts more than as living figures.