Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)

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Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Author

Accomplishments. Nathaniel Hawthorne specialized in short tales and longer romances. While publishing many short stories and sketches in various periodicals, Hawthorne published one short novel, Fanshawe (1828), and two collections of tales—Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)—before publishing the romances for which he is best known: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852). He continued to publish collections of his tales, publishing The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales in 1851, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys in 1852, and Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys in 1853. He published his last romance, The Marble Faun, in 1860. In addition to his fiction writing Hawthorne published the collection True Stories from History and Biography in 1851 and a political biography of his college friend and presidential hopeful, Franklin Pierce, in 1852.

Earning a Living. An 1825 graduate of Bowdoin College, Hawthorne struggled with the decision of which profession to enter. Hawthorne knew from childhood that he wanted to be a writer, but he also needed to make a living and found it hard to do both. As he wrote to his sister in 1820, “No Man can be a Poet & a Book-keeper at the same time.” Hawthorne ended up holding several government positions, from 1839 to 1840 as measurer of salt and coal at the Boston Customs House, from 1846 to 1849 as surveyor at the Salem Customs House, and from 1853 to 1857 as a consul in England. He found this work mind-numbing and believed that his writing suffered from it, but since his writing brought him only periods of security rather than a secure livelihood, he had no choice. The tension between the poet and the bookkeeper appeared in many of his works, often in essays such as “The Customs-House” (which introduces The Scarlet Letter ), where Hawthorne addressed readers directly to explain his theories of literary creation. Hawthorne’s tendency to disparage his own work in such pieces revealed not only his personal insecurity but also a more general concern about the validity of anyone trying to earn his living through fiction writing.

Sunshine and Shadows. Hawthorne’s preference for the short tale and for the romance was the result of his fascination with ambiguous symbolism and hidden darknesses. Hawthorne deliberately characterized his novel-length works as romances rather than novels because the form of the romance, as popularized by Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, allowed the author considerable leeway with historical materials, flexibility that would not be permitted by strict historical writing or by the format of the novel, which tended to operate in “real” rather than an imagined or distant time and to illustrate or replicate realistic events. By characterizing The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables as historical romances, Hawthorne was able to interpret New England’s Puritan history in a way that made larger points about contemporary American society; in The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne invented a fictional utopian community (drawn in part from his brief stay at Brook Farm) to comment generally on the reform movement.

Personal Life. Although friendly with several members of the Transcendentalist Club and sympathetic to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s interest in symbolic language, Hawthorne remained on the farthest fringes of this group Personally a shy and reserved man, Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody in 1842 and by doing so married into one of Salem’s most prominent families. His own family was considerably less demonstrative than hers; he found it painful and embarrassing to inform his family of his engagement, and no member of his family attended the wedding. Hawthorne died in 1864.