Nathaniel Hawthorne

• 1. Introduction

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  Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on the 4th of July, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, a town that had marked his family with a particular darkness long before he drew breath. Two of his ancestors had sat in judgment at the Salem witch trials, and their infamy never left him. He quietly added a "w" to the family name, Hathorne, shortly after graduating college, trying to put distance between himself and those notorious forebears. It did not entirely work. The guilt and sin of generations past would become the very engine of his fiction.

  For much of his early life, Hawthorne was barely noticed. He published his first novel anonymously in 1828, paid the printing costs himself, and later tried to suppress every surviving copy. He wrote stories that vanished into magazines without raising a murmur. He spent solitary years in what he called his "owl's nest," looking back on the period with the verdict: "I have not lived, but only dreamed about living." The questions worth asking about him are not just how he became famous, but what it cost, what drove a man so constitutionally reclusive to lay open the darkest corners of human nature for public inspection.

• 2. A Haunted Inheritance

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  William Hathorne, Hawthorne's great-great-great-grandfather, was among the earliest of the family to leave England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He settled first in Dorchester before making his way to Salem, where he rose to hold political positions including magistrate and judge, becoming, by the source's own word, infamous for harsh sentencing. His son John Hathorne went further still: he was one of the judges who presided over the Salem witch trials.

  Hawthorne grew up in the shadow of that record. His father, Nathaniel Hathorne Sr., died in 1808 of yellow fever in Dutch Suriname, leaving the boy, his older sister Elizabeth, and younger sister Louisa to live with relatives named the Mannings in Salem. The household stayed there for ten years. The town was never a neutral backdrop for Hawthorne; it was soaked in family history. In a stroke of symbolic timing, the very injury that first slowed the young Hawthorne down landed on the 10th of November, 1813, when he was struck on the leg playing bat and ball and spent a year lame and bedridden. Physicians found nothing clinically wrong, but the boy lay still, reading, while Salem pressed in around him.

  The summers the family spent in Raymond, Maine, near Sebago Lake gave him a rare interval of lightness. Hawthorne later recalled those days warmly: "That part of the country was wild then, with only scattered clearings, and nine tenths of it primeval woods." The contrast with Salem could not have been starker, and it sharpened his sense that one place could carry an almost physical weight of the past that another place could not.

• 3. Bowdoin and Early Obscurity

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  Robert Manning, Hawthorne's uncle, insisted the young man attend college over his protests, and the family's financial support sent him to Bowdoin College in 1821, partly because of family connections in Maine and partly because the tuition was relatively inexpensive. At the stage stop in Portland on the way there, Hawthorne met a fellow student named Franklin Pierce, and the two became fast friends on the spot. At Bowdoin he also encountered Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, future congressman Jonathan Cilley, and naval reformer Horatio Bridge.

  Hawthorne was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824 and graduated the following year, but he did not think of himself as a model student. He described his college years to Richard Henry Stoddard with cheerful candor: "I was an idle student, negligent of college rules and the Procrustean details of academic life, rather choosing to nurse my own fancies than to dig into Greek roots and be numbered among the learned Thebans."

  His first published novel, Fanshawe: A Tale, drew on his Bowdoin experiences and appeared anonymously in October 1828, printed at his own expense of $100. It received generally positive reviews but sold poorly. Hawthorne eventually tried to suppress it, judging it unworthy of his later standards. The stories he quietly placed in magazines over the following years, including "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil", drew little wider notice. It was his Bowdoin friend Horatio Bridge who, in the spring of 1837, offered to cover the financial risk of gathering those tales into the collection Twice-Told Tales, the volume that first made Hawthorne known locally.

• 4. Sophia, Brook Farm, and Domestic Life

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  Before the 1840s, Hawthorne had public flirtations with Mary Silsbee and Elizabeth Peabody, but it was Peabody's sister Sophia, an illustrator and transcendentalist, who became his companion for life. Sophia had spent much of her early life bedridden with frequent migraines and had undergone several experimental medical treatments; remarkably, her headaches appear to have subsided after she and Hawthorne grew close.

  He joined the transcendentalist Utopian community at Brook Farm in 1841 not out of philosophical conviction but for a practical reason: it helped him save money toward marriage. He paid a $1,000 deposit and was put in charge of shoveling a hill of manure the community called "the Gold Mine." He left before the year was out. The experiment struck him as a failure in human nature as much as economics, and it seeded the plot of his later novel The Blithedale Romance.

  Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody on the 9th of July, 1842, in a ceremony at the Peabody parlor on West Street in Boston. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where they stayed for three years. Ralph Waldo Emerson lived nearby and invited Hawthorne into his social circle, but Hawthorne was, by the source's account, almost pathologically shy and remained silent at gatherings. He referred to Sophia as his "Dove" and wrote that she "is, in the strictest sense, my sole companion; and I need no other." Sophia was no passive admirer; in her own journal she described being "dazzled and bewildered with the richness, the depth, the jewels of beauty" in his work.

  Their first child, Una, was born on the 3rd of March, 1844. Her name was a reference to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, to the displeasure of family members. Son Julian followed in 1846, and daughter Rose arrived in May 1851; Hawthorne called her his "autumnal flower." The birth of Una prompted a letter to a friend in which Hawthorne confessed: "I find it a very sober and serious kind of happiness that springs from the birth of a child... I have business on earth now."

• 5. The Scarlet Letter and the Berkshires

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  In April 1846, Hawthorne was appointed Surveyor for the District of Salem and Beverly and Inspector of the Revenue for the Port of Salem at a salary of $1,200 a year. The position left him miserable. He admitted to Longfellow that the Custom House mornings undid whatever progress the afternoons and evenings made on his writing. The job was also vulnerable to political change: Hawthorne was a Democrat, and when the administration shifted after the 1848 election, he lost his post.

  He wrote a letter of protest to the Boston Daily Advertiser, turning his dismissal into a widely discussed New England event. Then he channeled the experience into a preface for The Scarlet Letter, published in mid-March 1850, which made pointed allusions to local politicians who did not appreciate the treatment. The novel sold 2,500 volumes within ten days and earned Hawthorne $1,500 over the next fourteen years. D. H. Lawrence, writing in the twentieth century, said there could be no more perfect work of the American imagination. Hawthorne's friend Edwin Percy Whipple had objected to its "morbid intensity" and what he called its "painfully anatomical" psychology, but it was those very qualities that made the book last.

  At the end of March 1850, Hawthorne moved his family to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts. On the 5th of August, 1850, he attended a picnic hosted by a mutual friend and met Herman Melville for the first time. Melville had just finished reading Mosses from an Old Manse and published an unsigned review in The Literary World on the 17th and the 24th of August titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses," writing that the stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne "shrouded in blackness, ten times black." Melville was composing Moby-Dick at the time. He dedicated it in 1851 to Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne."

  The Berkshires years produced The House of the Seven Gables in 1851, which James Russell Lowell called "the most valuable contribution to New England history that has been made." Hawthorne also wrote The Blithedale Romance there in 1852, his only novel in the first person, and published A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, a retelling of myths he had been contemplating since 1846. Despite the productivity, Hawthorne found the winters punishing. The family left on the 21st of November, 1851, with Hawthorne noting, "I am sick to death of Berkshire."

• 6. Liverpool, Europe, and Return

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  Franklin Pierce won the presidency in 1852, and Hawthorne was rewarded in 1853 with the position of United States consul in Liverpool, a role his wife described as "second in dignity to the Embassy in London" and considered the most lucrative foreign service position of the time. The family lived in the Rock Park estate in Rock Ferry, in houses directly adjacent to Tranmere Beach on the Wirral shore of the River Mersey. Each day Hawthorne rode the steamboat from the Rock Ferry Slipway at the end of Bedford Road across to the consulate in Liverpool.

  Hawthorne had written a campaign biography of Pierce in 1852, The Life of Franklin Pierce, portraying his friend as "a man of peaceful pursuits." Horace Mann responded with the cutting remark that if Hawthorne made Pierce out to be a great or brave man, it would be the greatest work of fiction he had ever written. The biography notably omitted Pierce's drinking habits despite rumors of alcoholism and presented Pierce's view that slavery would, over time, "vanish like a dream."

  His appointment ended in 1857 with the close of the Pierce administration. The family toured France and Italy until 1860; somewhere in Italy, the previously clean-shaven Hawthorne grew a bushy mustache. When the family returned to The Wayside in Concord in 1860, Hawthorne published The Marble Faun, his first new novel in seven years. He described himself by then as "wrinkled with time and trouble." The fourteen-year earnings of The Scarlet Letter, $1,500, pointed to just how modest even a famous literary career could be.

• 7. Final Years and Death

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  At the outset of the American Civil War, Hawthorne traveled to Washington, D.C., with his publisher William D. Ticknor, met Abraham Lincoln, and wrote about the experience in his 1862 essay "Chiefly About War Matters." Failing health prevented him from completing several more romance novels, and the unfinished manuscripts, including The Dolliver Romance and Septimius Felton, were eventually published posthumously.

  Ticknor, who had handled Hawthorne's personal affairs down to the purchase of cigars and the overseeing of financial accounts, died with Hawthorne at his side in Philadelphia in 1864. A friend reported that Hawthorne was left "apparently dazed." Still suffering pain in his stomach, Hawthorne insisted on a recuperative trip with Pierce over the concerns of his neighbor Bronson Alcott, who feared he was too ill to travel.

  While touring the White Mountains, Hawthorne died in his sleep on the 19th of May, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Pierce sent a telegram to Elizabeth Peabody asking her to inform Mrs. Hawthorne in person. Hawthorne's son Julian, then a freshman at Harvard College, learned of his father's death the next day; by a strange coincidence, he was initiated into the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity that same day, blindfolded and placed in a coffin.

  Hawthorne was buried on what became known as "Authors' Ridge" in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. His pallbearers included Longfellow, Emerson, Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James T. Fields, and Edwin Percy Whipple. Emerson wrote of the funeral that there was "a tragic element in the event, that might be more fully rendered, in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, and he died of it." Sophia and daughter Una were originally buried in England; in June 2006, they were reinterred in plots beside him on that same ridge.

• 8. Literary Legacy

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  Hawthorne's four major romances were written between 1850 and 1860: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. He drew a careful distinction between the romance and the novel, writing in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables that his method used an "atmospherical medium" to bring out lights and deepen shadows in ways that the novel, bound to probable experience, could not.

  Edgar Allan Poe reviewed both Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse, and despite his contempt for allegory and his chronic accusations of plagiarism, he conceded: "The style of Mr. Hawthorne is purity itself... We look upon him as one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth." Henry James praised Hawthorne's care for "the deeper psychology." Evert Augustus Duyckinck called him "of the American writers destined to live, the most original, the one least indebted to foreign models or literary precedents of any kind."

  The critic Harold Bloom placed only Henry James and William Faulkner as credible challengers to Hawthorne's position as the greatest American novelist. Bloom named The Scarlet Letter as Hawthorne's greatest work, followed by The Marble Faun and a cluster of short stories including "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "Young Goodman Brown," "Wakefield," and "Feathertop."

  The definitive scholarly edition of Hawthorne's work, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by William Charvat and others, ran to twenty-three volumes published by The Ohio State University Press between 1962 and 1997. A man who once called himself an idle student and doubted his own early stories had by then furnished enough material to fill nearly a quarter-century of editorial labor.