Everything about Nathaniel Hawthorne totally explained
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.
Shortly after graduating from
Bowdoin College, Hathorne changed his name to Hawthorne. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled
Fanshawe, in 1828. In 1837, he published
Twice-Told Tales and became engaged to
Sophia Peabody the next year. He worked at a
Custom House and joined a
Transcendentalist Utopian 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 took Hawthorne and family to Europe before returning to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on
May 19,
1864, leaving behind his wife and their three children.
Much of Hawthorne's writing centers around
New England and many feature moral
allegories with a
Puritan inspiration. His work is considered part of the
Romantic movement and includes novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend, the United States President
Franklin Pierce.
Biography
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on
July 4,
1804, in
Salem,
Massachusetts; his
birthplace is preserved and open to the public.
William Hathorne, who emigrated from England in
1630, was the first of Hawthorne's ancestors to arrive in the colonies. After arriving, William persecuted Quakers. William's son
John Hathorne was one of the judges who oversaw the
Salem Witch Trials. Having learned about this, the author may have 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
Suriname. Young Nathaniel, his mother and two sisters moved in with maternal relatives, the Mannings, in Salem, where they lived for ten years.
When Hawthorne was 12, his mother moved the family into an uncle's house in
Raymond, Maine near
Sebago Lake (the house is still standing and open to the public). Hawthorne's sister Elizabeth stated later that Hawthorne's life in Maine was crucial to his becoming a writer. Hawthorne's uncle insisted, despite Hawthorne's protests, that the boy attend college. On the way to
Bowdoin College, at the stage stop in Portland, Hawthorne met future president
Franklin Pierce. The two became fast friends.
Hawthorne attended Bowdoin at the expense of an uncle from 1821 to 1825, partly because of family business connections nearby. There, he also befriended the future poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, future congressman
Jonathan Cilley, and future naval reformer
Horatio Bridge. 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. After public flirtations with local women Mary Silsbee and
Elizabeth Peabody, he'd 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 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 would prove an inspiration for his novel
The Blithedale Romance.
Marriage
While at Bowdoin, Hawthorne had bet his friend Jonathan Cilley a bottle of
Madeira wine that he wouldn't be married in 12 years. By 1836 he'd won the wager, but didn't remain a bachelor for life. After three years of engagement, Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody on
July 9,
1842 at a ceremony in the Peabody parlor. The couple 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 Salem and later to the Berkshires, returning in 1852 to Concord. In February, they bought The Hillside, a home previously owned by the Alcotts. Hawthorne renamed it
The Wayside. 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'm always looking forward to a second reading where I can ponder and muse and fully take in the miraculous wealth of thoughts."
Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne had three children: Una,
Julian, and
Rose. Una was a victim of mental illness and died young.
Julian became a prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction. 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.
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. A Democrat, Hawthorne lost this job due to the change of administration in Washington after the presidential election of 1848. Hawthorne 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. Hawthorne was deeply affected by the death of his mother shortly thereafter in July, calling it, "the darkest hour I ever lived."
Later years
Hawthorne returned to writing and published
The Scarlet Letter on
March 15,
1850, including a preface which refers to his three-year tenure in the Custom House. The book became an immediate best-seller.
The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and
The Blithedale Romance (1852) followed in quick succession.
Hawthorne became friends with
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and
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, which Melville later praised in a famous review, "Hawthorne and His Mosses." Melville's letters to Hawthorne provide insight into the composition of
Moby-Dick, which Melville dedicated to Hawthorne in "admiration for his genius". Hawthorne's letters to Melville don't survive.
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. Wife Sophia and daughter Una were originally buried in England. However, in June 2006, they were re-interred in plots adjacent to Nathaniel.
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. Hawthorne defined a romance as being radically different from a novel by not being concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience.
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.) Only after collecting a number of his short stories into the two-volume
Twice-Told Tales in 1837 did Hawthorne begin to attach his name to his works.
Literary style and themes
Hawthorne's work belongs to
Romanticism, an artistic and intellectual movement characterized by an emphasis on individual freedom from social conventions or political restraints, on human imagination, and on nature in a typically idealized form. Romantic literature rebelled against the formalism of 18th century reason.
Much of Hawthorne's work is set in colonial
New England, and many of his short stories have been read as moral
allegories influenced by his
Puritan background. "
Ethan Brand" (1850) tells the story of a lime-burner who sets off to find the Unpardonable Sin, and in doing so, commits it. One of Hawthorne's most famous tales, "
The Birth-Mark" (1843), concerns a young doctor who removes a birthmark from his wife's face, an operation which kills her. Hawthorne based parts of this story on the penny press novels he loved to read. Other well-known tales include "
Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844), "
My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832), "
The Minister's Black Veil" (1836), and "
Young Goodman Brown" (1835). "
The Maypole of Merrymount" (1836) recounts an encounter between the Puritans and the forces of anarchy and hedonism.
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852) and
Tanglewood Tales (1853) were re-tellings for children of some
Greek myths, from which was named the
Tanglewood estate and music venue.
Hawthorne is also considered among the first to experiment with
alternate history as literary form. His
1845 short story "
P.'s Correspondence" (a part of "Mosses from an Old Manse") is the first known complete
English language alternate history and among the most early in any language. The story's protagonist is considered "a madman" due to his perceiving an alternative
1845 in which long-dead historical and literary figures are still alive; these delusions feature the poets
Burns,
Byron,
Shelley, and
Keats, the actor
Edmund Kean, the British politician
George Canning and even
Napoleon Bonaparte.
Contemporary response to Hawthorne's work praised his sentimentality and moral purity while more modern evaluations focus on the dark psychological complexity. Recent criticism has focused on Hawthorne's narrative voice, treating it as a self-conscious
rhetorical construction, not to be conflated with Hawthorne's own voice. Such an approach complicates the long-dominant tradition of regarding Hawthorne as a gloomy, guilt-ridden
moralist.
Criticism
Edgar Allan Poe wrote important, though largely unflattering reviews of both
Twice-Told Tales and
Mosses from an Old Manse, mostly due to Poe's own contempt of allegory, moral tales, and his chronic accusations of plagiarism. However, even Poe admitted, "The style of Hawthorne is purity itself. His tone is singularly effective—wild, plaintive, thoughtful, and in full accordance with his themes." He concluded that, "we look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth."
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "Nathaniel Hawthorne's reputation as a writer is a very pleasing act, because his writing isn't 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".
Selected works
Novels
Short story collections
Selected short stories
Further Information
Get more info on 'Nathaniel Hawthorne'.
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