About the Author

Perhaps no other nineteenth-century American writer pursued more relentlessly the nature of human kind as did Nathaniel Hawthorne. Steeped in a New England Puritan heritage that included his own ancestor's judicial participation in the Salem witch trials and hysteria of 1692, Hawthorne elevated some of the darkest events of the colonial period and transformed them into universal themes and questions, providing not so much a catalog of answers as a pattern of ambiguities that leaves his readers to chart their own moral and ethical courses.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. After a short period in Maine, Hawthorne returned to Salem just before beginning his studies at Bowdoin College in 1821. There he befriended, among other influential personalities, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, who would become President of the United States. He returned home for the next twelve years where he lived in his mother's home. During this period, he began his writing career in earnest, first with a novel, Fanshawe (1828), a work based upon his college experiences at Bowdoin. His first short story, "The Gentle Boy," appeared in The Token, a gift book, as did several others which Hawthorne finally collected and republished as his first volume of short stories, Twice-Told Tales (1837, 1842).

In 1838, secretly engaged to Sophia Peabody and confronted with the necessity to earn money toward his future marriage, Hawthorne took a job as a customs clerk in the United States Customs House at Salem Harbor. After a short time, however, he moved into the socialist colony at Brook Farm, but abandoned the experimental community after seven months, deciding against bringing his future wife to live there. Instead, following their marriage in 1842, he and Sophia moved into the Old Manse at Concord, Massachusetts, beginning one of the most delightful periods of his life. At the Old Manse, only a literal stone's throw from Concord's North Bridge, the site of some of the first skirmishes of the American Revolution, Nathaniel Hawthorne continued his exploration of the human psyche-in-conflict in one short story after another from his tiny, two-foot by two-foot, wall-mounted writing board in the sunny upstairs bedroom.

In 1846, the Hawthornes were forced from their idyllic compound at the Old Manse with the return of its owner, and Hawthorne with his wife and two young children moved into what would be their only permanent residence, the "Wayside" home in Concord. After a year, however, they returned to Salem where the writer took up his position at the Customs House as a revenue surveyor for a little over two years. While in Salem again, Hawthorne began the most productive period of his life. Just after he lost his job in a turn of political fortunes, he continued the draft of the book that would bring him universal attention, The Scarlet Letter, which he published in 1850. From Lenox, Massachusetts, where he enjoyed the company of Melville, he followed almost immediately with The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and in the same year, The Life of Franklin Pierce. In 1852, he published The Blithdale Romance, a novel based upon the Brook Farm Colony, and purchased "The Wayside" residence in Concord.

That same year, the gratified American president rewarded his biographer with the post of consul to Liverpool, England. Hawthorne moved his family to the British Isle where, aside from the performance of his perfunctory duties, he seized the opportunity to make useful literary contacts. Additionally, as time permitted, the Hawthorne family traveled extensively, both in England and on the Continent. His experiences there gave him even more valuable historical content, part of which informed his last novel, The Marble Fawn (1860) and the English Notebooks and, later, the French and Italian Notebooks, both sets published posthumously.

In 1860, his consular duties completed, Hawthorne and his family returned to The Wayside in Concord where he would live out his days, writing in a third-story office tower that he had erected. By then, the internationally acclaimed American writer comfortably took his place among the Concord literary community, including the likes of Emerson, the Alcotts, and Thoreau. Hawthorne would never ascend to the same literary power he achieved in The Scarlet Letter, though. When, in 1864, he died at 60 while on a walking tour in Plymouth, New Hampshire, Ralph Waldo Emerson, among the many friends and mourners who gathered at his graveside on May 24th, eulogized the famous writer, but couldn't refrain from a lamenting that, in accepting his political appointments, Hawthorne had sold short his talents to the effect of dissipating his earlier genius.

Not only Emerson, but also other contemporary writers included in the canon of classical American writers of the nineteenth century recognized Hawthorne's unique contributions. Edgar Allan Poe, in a poignant piece of criticism, "A Review of Twice-Told Tales," considered Hawthorne's short stories as literary ideals, achieving the high purpose and aesthetics with which he would shape his own works. Likewise, Herman Melville, in "Hawthorne and His Mosses," found in Hawthorne's collection of short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), the towering moral framework to which he dedicated Moby Dick in 1851.

Today, his place secure, Nathaniel Hawthorne is remembered as a writer of symbolic literature that, like the Romantic literature of his European counterparts, explores the complex nature of human kind that defied the Neo-classical assumptions about the authority of reason. In deference to the romance that claims a "certain latitude" beyond the limitations of the more strictly realistic novel, Hawthorne's best works blur the edges between experience and the imagination and penetrate the shadowy boundaries of the psyche, or what he called "the human heart."