'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.
Biography
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on
July 4,
1804, in
Salem,
Massachusetts, where his
birthplace is now a museum. 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.
[1] Hawthorne's father, Nathaniel Hathorne, Sr., was a sea captain who died in
1808 of
yellow fever, when Hawthorne was only four years old, in
Raymond, Maine.
Hawthorne attended
Bowdoin College at the expense of an uncle from 1821 to 1825, befriending classmates
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president
Franklin Pierce. While there he joined the
Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. 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."
[2] 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. He had 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; later that year, however, he left when he became dissatisfied with farming and the experiment. (His Brook Farm adventure would prove an inspiration for his novel ''
The Blithedale Romance''.) He married Sophia in 1842; they 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 and a new home
The Wayside, previously owned by the Alcotts. 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 am always looking forward to a second reading where I can ponder and muse and fully take in the miraculous wealth of thoughts."
[3]
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's career as a novelist was boosted by ''
The Scarlet Letter'' in 1850, in which the preface refers to his three-year tenure in the Custom House at Salem. ''
The House of the Seven Gables'' (1851) and ''
The Blithedale Romance'' (1852) followed in quick succession.
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.
Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne had three children: Una,
Julian, and
Rose. Una was a victim of mental illness and died young. Julian moved out west, served a jail term for
embezzlement and wrote a book about his father. 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.
Writings
Statue of Hawthorne in Salem, Massachusetts.
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.
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.
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.
His writings were in the Romantic Period. 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.
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.
Hawthorne enjoyed a brief but intense friendship with
American novelist Herman Melville beginning on
August 5,
1850, when the two 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 appreciation for his genius". Hawthorne's letters to Melville do not survive.
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."
[4]
Notable works of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Novels
Short story collections
Selected short stories
Nonfiction and other books
★ ''The Gentle Boy: A Thrice-Told Tale'' (1839)
★ ''Famous Old People'' (1841)
★ ''Grandfather's Chair'' (1841)
★ ''Liberty Tree'' (1841)
★ ''Biographical Stories for Children'' (1842) |
★ ''A Visit to the Celestial City'' (1844)
★ ''Journal of an African Cruiser'' (1845)
★ ''The Life of Franklin Pierce'' (1852)
★ ''Feathertop'' (1852) |
★ ''A Rill from the Town Pump'' (1857)
★ ''Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches'' (1863)
★ ''Pansie, a Fragment'' (1864)
★ ''The Ancestral Footstep'' (Outline of an unfinished romance novel, 1882) |
References
1. McFarland, Philip, ''Hawthorne in Concord'', p. 18. Grove Press, 2004.
2. Letter to Longfellow, June 4, 1837.
3. January 14, 1851, Journal of Sophia Hawthorne. Berg Collection NY Public Library.
4. McFarland, Philip, ''Hawthorne in Concord'', pp. 88-89. Grove Press, 2004.
5. Publication info on books from Editor's Note to the ''The Scarlet Letter'' by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Page by Page Books, accessed June 11, 2007.
See also
★
Dark romanticism
★
Gothic literature
★ ''
The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales''
One of the three Houses of Chelmsford High School (Massachusetts) is named after Hawthorne. The other houses are named after
John Greenleaf Whittier and
Ralph Waldo Emerson. There was a fourth house, named after
Emily Dickinson, but it was dissolved.
External links
★ Eldred's
Hawthorne site at Eldritch Press contains all of Hawthorne's works, notes on the writings, annotated editions, and lots of other information
★ The
Hawthorne in Salem Website was funded in May of 2000 by a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a collaborative effort of North Shore Community College in Danvers, Massachusetts, and three Salem, Massachusetts museums with important Hawthorne collections.
★
Herman Melville's appreciation,
"Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1851)
★
Henry James's
book-length study, ''
Hawthorne'' (1879)
★
★
Second copy at
Project Gutenberg
★
The Wayside The only home Hawthorne ever owned.
★
WBUR's celebration of Nathaniel Hawthorne at 200, with links to NPR's "The Connection" on Hawthorne's birthday, as well as an interview with author Phillip McFarland
★
''Legends of the Province House and Other Twice Told Tales'', text and images
★
★
American literary couple reunited after 150 years
★
WorldCat Identities page for 'Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1804-1864'
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