HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel

Nationality: American. Born: Nathaniel Hathorne in Salem, Massachusetts, 4 July 1804. Education: Samuel Archer's School, Salem, 1819; Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, 1821-25. Family: Married Sophia Peabody in 1842; two daughters and one son. Career: Lived with his mother in Salem, writing and contributing to periodicals, 1825-36; editor, American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, Boston, 1836; weigher and gager, Boston Customs House, 1839-41; invested and lived at the Brook Farm Commune, West Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1841-42. Lived in Concord, Massachusetts, 1842-45, 1852, and 1860-64. Surveyor, Salem Customs House, 1846-49. Lived in Lenox, Massachusetts, 1850-51, and West Newton, Massachusetts, 1851. U.S. Consul, Liverpool, England, 1853-57. Lived in Italy, 1858-59, and London, 1859-60. Died: 19 May 1864.

Publications

Collections

Complete Writings. 22 vols., 1900.

Complete Novels and Selected Tales, edited by Norman HolmesPearson. 1937.

The Portable Hawthorne, edited by Malcolm Cowley. 1948; revised edition, 1969; as Hawthorne: Selected Works, 1971.

Works (Centenary Edition), edited by William Charvat and others.1963—.

Poems, edited by Richard E. Peck. 1967.

Tales and Sketches (Library of America), edited by Roy HarveyPearce. 1982.

Novels (Library of America), edited by Millicent Bell. 1983.

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Three Complete Novels. 1993.

Miscellaneous Prose and Verse. 1994.

Short Stories

Fanshawe: A Tale. 1828.

Twice-Told Tales. 1837; revised edition, 1842.

Mosses from an Old Manse. 1846.

The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales. 1851.

The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces, edited by Sophia Hawthorne. 1876.

Fanshawe and Other Pieces. 1876.

Novels

The Celestial Rail-Road. 1843.

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. 1850.

The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance. 1851.

The Blithedale Romance. 1852.

Transformation; or, The Romance of Monte Beni. 1860; as The Marble Faun, 1860.

Pansie: A Fragment. 1864.

Septimius: A Romance, edited by Una Hawthorne and RobertBrowning. 1872; as Septimius Felton; or The Elixir of Life, 1872.

Dr. Grimshaw's Secret: A Romance, edited by Julian Hawthorne.1883; edited by Edward H. Davidson, 1954.

The Ghost of Dr. Harris. 1900.

The Great Stone Face. 1997.

Other

Grandfather's Chair: A History for Youth. 1841; Famous Old People, Being the Second Epoch of Grandfather's Chair, 1841; Liberty Tree, with the Last Words of Grandfather's Chair, 1841, revised edition, 1842.

Biographical Stories for Children. 1842.

True Stories from History and Biography. 1851.

A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. 1851.

Life of Franklin Pierce (campaign biography). 1852.

Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys, Being a Second Wonder-Book. 1853.

Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches. 1863; in Works, 1970.

Passages from the American Note-Books, edited by Sophia Hawthorne. 2 vols., 1868.

Passages from the English Note-Books, edited by Sophia Hawthorne. 2 vols., 1870.

Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books, edited by UnaHawthorne. 2 vols., 1871.

Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny: A Diary. 1904.

Love Letters. 2 vols., 1907.

Letters to William D. Ticknor. 2 vols., 1910.

The Heart of Hawthorne's Journal, edited by Newton Arvin. 1929.

The American Notebooks, edited by Randall Stewart. 1932; in Works, 1972.

The English Notebooks, edited by Randall Stewart. 1941.

Hawthorne as Editor: Selections from His Writings in the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, edited by Arlin Turner. 1941.

Hawthorne's Lost Notebook 1835-1841, edited by Barbara S. Mouffe. 1978.

American Travel Sketches, edited by Alfred Weber and others. 1989.

Editor, with Elizabeth Hawthorne, Peter Parley's Universal History. 2 vols., 1837; as Peter Parley's Common School History, 1838.

Editor, Journal of an African Cruiser, by Horatio Bridge. 1845.

Editor, The Yarn of a Yankee Privateer, by Benjamin FrederickBrowne(?). 1926.

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Bibliography:

Hawthorne: A Descriptive Bibliography by C.E. Frazer Clark, Jr., 1978; Hawthorne and the Critics: A Checklist of Criticism 1900-1978 by Jeanetta Boswell, 1982; Hawthorne: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism Before 1900 by Gary Scharnhorst, 1988.

Critical Studies:

Hawthorne by Henry James, 1879; Hawthorne: A Biography by Randall Stewart, 1948; Hawthorne by Mark Van Doren, 1949; Hawthorne's Fiction: The Light and the Dark, 1952, revised edition, 1964, and Hawthorne's Imagery, 1969, both by Richard Harter Fogle; Hawthorne: A Critical Study, 1955, revised edition, 1963, and The Presence of Hawthorne, 1979, both by Hyatt H. Waggoner; Hawthorne's Tragic Vision by Roy R. Male, 1957; Hawthorne, Man and Writer by Edward Wagenknecht, 1961; Hawthorne: An Introduction and Interpretation, 1961, and Hawthorne: A Biography, 1980, both by Arlin Turner; Hawthorne Centenary Essays edited by Roy Harvey Pearce, 1964; Hawthorne by Terence Martin, 1965, revised edition, 1983; The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes by Frederick Crews, 1966; Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by A. N. Kaul, 1966; Twentieth-Century Interpretations of The Scarlet Letter edited by John C. Gerber, 1968; Plots and Characters in the Fiction and Sketches of Hawthorne, 1968, and A Hawthorne Encyclopedia, 1991, both by Robert L. Gale; Hawthorne, Transcendental Symbolist by Marjorie Elder, 1969; The Recognition of Hawthorne: Selected Criticism since 1828 edited by B. Bernard Cohen, 1969; Hawthorne as Myth-Maker: A Study in Imagination by Hugo McPherson, 1969; Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, 1970, and Hawthorne: A Collection of Criticism, 1975, both edited by J. Donald Crowley; The Pursuit of Form: A Study of Hawthorne and the Romance by John Caldwell Stubbs, 1970; Hawthorne's Early Tales: A Critical Study by Neal F. Doubleday, 1972; Hawthorne's Career by Nina Baym, 1976; Hawthorne: The Poetics of Enchantment by Edgar A. Dryden, 1977; Rediscovering Hawthorne by Kenneth Dauber, 1977; Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams by Rita K. Gollin, 1979; A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Hawthorne by Lea B.V. Newman, 1979; Hawthorne: The English Experience 1853-1864 by Raymona E. Hull, 1980; Hawthorne in His Times by James R. Mellow, 1980; The Productive Tension of Hawthorne's Art by Claudia D. Johnson, 1981; Hawthorne: New Critical Essays edited by A. Robert Lee, 1982; Family Themes in Hawthorne's Fiction by Gloria C. Erlich, 1984; The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales by Michael J. Colacurcio, 1984, and New Essays on The Scarlet Letter edited by Colacurcio, 1985; Hawthorne's Secret: An Untold Tale by Philip Young, 1984; Hawthorne's Tales edited by James McIntosh, 1987; Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne's Novels by Gordon Hutner, 1989; Hawthorne and the Romance of the Orient by Luther S. Luedtke, 1989; Hawthorne's Early Narrative Art by Melinda M. Ponder, 1990; Hawthorne: Tradition and Revolution by Charles Swann, 1991; The Hawthorne and Melville Friendship edited by James C. Wilson, 1991; The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne's Fiction by Joel Pfister, 1992; The Critical Responses to Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter edited by Gary Scharnhorst, 1992; Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Study of the Short Fiction by Nancy L. Bunge, 1993; The Style of Hawthorne's Gaze: Regarding Subjectivity by John Dolis, 1993; A Thick and Darksome Veil: The Rhetoric of Hawthorne's Sketches, Prefaces, and Essays by Thomas R. Moore, 1994; Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews, 1994; Engendering Romance: Women Writers and the Hawthorne Tradition by E. Miller Budick, 1994; The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne's Early Tales by Michael J. Colacurcio, 1995; Hawthorne's Narrative Strategies by Michael Dunne, 1995; The Making of the Hawthorne Subject by Alison Easton, 1996; Liquid Fire: Transcendental Mysticism in the Romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Harvey L. Gable, 1997; Mesmerism and Hawthorne: Mediums of American Romance by Samuel Coale, 1998.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne's career as a writer of short fiction began inauspiciously with his failure to publish any of three unified collections of tales and sketches ("Seven Tales of My Native Land," "Provincial Tales," and "The Story Teller"). As a result he was forced to publish most of these pieces separately—and anonymously or pseudonymously—in newspapers and in the few magazines and gift-book annuals available in the American literary scene. It was not until almost a decade later, in 1837, when he had written almost 50 tales and sketches, some of them among his finest, that he published 18 under his own name as Twice-Told Tales. In 1842 a two-volume edition of his work added 19 others. Mosses from an Old Manse reprinted 22 more with an author's preface, "The Old Manse." His third major collection, The Snow-Image, did not appear until 1851 after Hawthorne had turned to writing full-length romances, and a number of the 15 selections—most notably "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"—predated the 1837 volume. By this time Hawthorne had begun to enjoy widespread acclaim as author of The Scarlet Letter, a romance that Henry James would later describe as America's first indisputably classic work of fiction.

The story of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale marks at once the culmination and the transformation of Hawthorne's development as a writer of tales; likewise, "The Custom-House" introduction perfects his use of the sketch form as a way, fully integrated with the fiction, of commenting on the American artist's situation and on the nature both of his materials and his creative processes. Together they define the two most essential threads of his practice in short fiction. Indeed, his original choice of title for his masterpiece, curious but instructive, is probably the best description of the work he did between 1828 and 1851, "Old Time Legends: Together with Sketches, Experimental and Ideal."

The conventions and exigencies of publication, Hawthorne's right sense of his audience's predisposition to sentimental and pietistic didacticism, and his own penchant for historical consciousness and what James called "the deeper psychology" required that Hawthorne not only create fictions but instruct his audience about the nature of those fictions. Thus, he was given to frequent subtitles such as "A Parable," "A Fantasy," "An Imaginary Retrospect," "A Moralized Legend," and "Allegories of the Heart," all of them designed to mediate between his readers and his materials; thus, too, did he write half a dozen juvenile collections, as if to prepare a serious audience for the future. Often (as in the four "Legends of the Province-House") he used framed narratives that allowed the collaborative voice and character of the narrator/persona to guarantee the reliability of the tale. One of his finest sketches, "The Haunted Mind," traces, like many of his prefaces, the processes of the creative imagination. And among the memorable tales that dramatize the plight of the artist caught between the hard-headed practicality of his audience and the subtleties of his materials are "Drowne's Wooden Image," "The Artist and the Beautiful," and "The Snow-Image." Nowhere is that collaborative, and meditative, voice more obvious than in "Wakefield," the slight sketch of a middle-aged man who, all unaware, leaves his wife of ten years and spends the next 20 years viewing her behavior in his absence, "If the reader choose," says the narrator, "let him do his own meditation; or if he prefer to ramble with me through the twenty years of Wakefield's vagary, I bid him welcome."

Hawthorne's imagination found his own contemporary scene recalcitrant: what he called "The Present, the Immediate, the Actual" offered him no fit materials. He needed, he said, "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other." Typical opening sentences that establish that "neutral territory" through vague distancing include: "In the latter part of the last century," "At nightfall, once, in the olden time," and "In those strange old times, when fantastic dreams and madmen's reveries were realized among the actual circumstances of life." The strategy is by no means escapist but is instead Hawthorne's indirect way of exercising his acute sense of the past to comment incisively on humankind's moral condition in the present.

It was early New England history—provincial and colonial—and the drama of Puritan consciousness that provided the richest abundance of materials, themes, and techniques. "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" dramatizes allegorically the struggle between the Puritan Endicott and the Merry Mounters, "Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire." Mr. Hooper's crepe veil in "The Minister's Black Veil" is the sort of single central symbol that anticipates Hester's scarlet letter; like the letter, the veil is also a symbolic action expressive at once of self-concealment and self-revelation; like it, too, the veil at once alienates Hooper from his community and encloses him within it. The Puritan mistreatment of the Quaker boy Ilbrahim in "The Gentle Boy" constitutes an early version of Hawthorne's later definition of the unpardonable sin, "The violation of the sanctity of the human heart." In "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" young Robin, thinking it "high time to begin the world" with the aid of his powerful relative, leaves home only to discover himself participating symbolically in the ritual killing of his would-be benefactor. Robin discovers not only that he can't go home again but the same grim fact that so many other protagonists do. In Ralph Waldo Emerson's terms, the truth goes this way: "It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man." Hawthorne's genius in developing this and other themes has made him a profound influence on other major writers as various as Herman Melville and Henry James, Robert Frost and William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Jorge Luis Borges.

—J. Donald Crowley

See the essays on "The Birthmark," "Wakefield," and "Young Goodman Brown."