(Like the majority of Hawthorne’s stories, "The Minister’s...)
Like the majority of Hawthorne’s stories, "The Minister’s Black Veil" is an allegorical criticism of Puritan beliefs. Hawthorne may have been inspired by clergyman Joseph Moody, who accidentally killed his friend and, in response, wore a black veil until his own death.
(In The Haunted Mind, Hawthorne described an intermediate ...)
In The Haunted Mind, Hawthorne described an intermediate space between sleeping and waking. The story begins with the character's sudden waking from midnight slumber.
(A vicious tempest is raging on a New England mountainside...)
A vicious tempest is raging on a New England mountainside. A young traveler sojourns through the sea of wind and snow, finding refuge in a cottage, cozily nestled in the notch of a hill. The traveler burns with a determination to make his name known to the world. But that will all have to wait until the storm subsides.
(This volume collects many of Hawthorne's most famous shor...)
This volume collects many of Hawthorne's most famous short works and is a fitting compendium of his literary achievements for newcomers or longtime Hawthorne fans alike.
(Grandfather’s Chair is a short story collection written b...)
Grandfather’s Chair is a short story collection written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. To the literary student "Grandfather's Chair" presents two points deserving notice: one, the fact that the incident of Endicott's cutting the red cross from the banner of England, which furnished the motive for a Twice-Told Tale, is here treated in a manner quite different; the other, that the exile of the Acadians is chosen by Hawthorne as one of the occurrences likely to appeal to his youthful audience.
(Rappaccini's Daughter is a short story by Nathaniel Hawth...)
Rappaccini's Daughter is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the December 1844 issue of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, and later in the 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. It is about Giacomo Rappaccini, a medical researcher in medieval Padua who grows a garden of poisonous plants. He brings up his daughter to tend the plants, and she becomes resistant to the poisons, but in the process she herself becomes poisonous to others. The traditional story of a poisonous maiden has been traced back to India, and Hawthorne's version has been adopted in contemporary works.
(The Artist and the Beautiful is one of the best-known sho...)
The Artist and the Beautiful is one of the best-known short stories by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. First published in 1846, it explores the secrets of artistic creation.
(Mosses from an Old Manse is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s second ...)
Mosses from an Old Manse is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s second story collection, first published in 1846 in two volumes and featuring sketches and tales written over a span of more than twenty years, including such classics as "Young Goodman Brown," "The Birthmark," and "Rappaccini’s Daughter."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter reaches to our n...)
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nation's historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the defiant Hester Prynne; the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; and the obsessed, vengeful Chillingworth.
(This collection of tales is an engaging compendium of Haw...)
This collection of tales is an engaging compendium of Hawthorne's short stories, including many set in and around the writer's native New England. The title story is a charming fable-like tale that takes as its focus a long-famous geological feature in the New Hampshire mountains.
(The sins of one generation are visited upon another in a ...)
The sins of one generation are visited upon another in a haunted New England mansion until the arrival of a young woman from the country breathes new air into mouldering lives and rooms. The House of the Seven Gables re-addresses the theme of human guilt in a style remarkable in both its descriptive virtuosity and its truly modern mix of fantasy and realism.
(Six legends of Greek mythology, retold for children by Na...)
Six legends of Greek mythology, retold for children by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Included are The Gorgon’s Head, The Golden Touch, The Paradise of Children, The Three Golden Apples, The Miraculous Pitcher, and The Chimaera.
(The Blithedale Romance is the story of four inhabitants o...)
The Blithedale Romance is the story of four inhabitants of the commune: Hollingsworth, a misogynist philanthropist obsessed with turning Blithedale into a colony for the reformation of criminals; Zenobia, a passionate feminist; Priscilla, who turns out to be Zenobia's half-sister; and Miles Coverdale, the narrator of the story. The story concerns the freindship of the four at the commune, which starts intensely during the spring and summer but as autumn approaches begins to disintegrate towards a tragic end.
(The fragility - and the durability - of human life and ar...)
The fragility - and the durability - of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the "Marble Faun", Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam's unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy.
(This Library of America volume offers what no reader has ...)
This Library of America volume offers what no reader has ever been able to find - an authoritative edition of all the tales and sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne in a single comprehensive volume. Everything is included from his three books of stories, Twice-told Tales (1837, revised 1851), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846, 1854), and The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-told Tales (1851), and from his two books of stories for children based on classical myths, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853) - along with sixteen stories not found in any of these volumes.
(The pieces collected here deal with essentially American ...)
The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly - often wickedly - unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination. Written in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, these works are informed by themes that reappear in Hawthorne's longer works: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer. His work was based on the history of his Puritan ancestors and the New England of his own day. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables are classics of American literature.
Background
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1804, the son of Captain Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Manning Hathorne. His father, a sea captain, died when the boy was four, and Mrs. Hathorne (Hawthorne added the "w" to the name) returned to her father's house in Salem, where Nathaniel and his sisters were brought up.
His childhood was calm, a little isolated but far from unhappy, especially since as a handsome and attractive only son he was idolized by his mother and his two sisters.
Education
With the aid of his prosperous maternal uncles, the Mannings, Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College from 1821 to 1825. Though small and isolated, the Bowdoin of 1826 was an unusually good college, and Hawthorne undoubtedly profited by his formal education, as well as making steadfast friends.
After his graduation from college, Hawthorne spent 12 years at home writing tales and sketches which appeared in gift annuals, magazines, and newspapers. His introspective nature was intensified by these 12 years, which he spent almost entirely without the society of his few only friends. He applied himself to his writing, going over his stories and essays again and again. Because they did not attain the standards he set for himself, and possibly because they received almost no public recognition, he destroyed several short stories and as many copies as he could of a novel, Fanshawe, which he had published privately in 1828.
Hawthorne drew the backgrounds, situations, and many of the characters of his works from his travels throughout New England during the summers. He spent much of his time at taverns, country fairs, and other such social meeting places, and among the common people who attended such affairs, people to whom he was unknown, Hawthorne's reserve and shyness disappeared. He mingled freely with them and talked with no hesitation. The reading, traveling, and writing of this period proved to be the apprenticeship of his career.
His stories of this period were later collected and published in the volume Twice-Told Tales (1837) through the encouragement and financial backing of his closest college friend, Horatio Bridge. Among the best known of these stories are "The Gray Champion," "The Gentle Boy," "A Rill from the Town Pump," "The Great Carbuncle," "Sights from a Steeple," and "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." The last story and some of those that followed in the second volume of Twice-Told Tales (1842) are examples of Hawthorne's interest in allegory. "The Celestial Railroad," a parody of Bunyan, is one of the better-known works in this volume. In "Earth's Holocaust" mankind burns all the symbols of aristocracy, including the gallows. Though they are well known, these stories are not among Hawthorne's most successful works.
The years 1839 to 1841, during which Hawthorne worked as measurer in the Boston Custom House, constituted, with the exception of the period he spent later as consul in Liverpool, the most socially active period of his entire life. He developed a close friendship with Longfellow, whom he had not known well in college, and also with George Hillard, the law partner of Charles Sumner. At Longfellow's home he met Cornelius Felton, later president of Harvard, and James Russell Lowell, Longfellow's neighbor on Brattle Street. Hawthorne also became acquainted with Emerson, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, and others through his meeting with Sophia Peabody and her sister Elizabeth in 1837. Through them he became well acquainted with the literary figures in the Boston area, and because he wished to marry Sophia, he set about earning his living. During these years his writing was confined to a series of children's books on Colonial history, which were published by Elizabeth Peabody.
In 1841 a change in the administration in Washington brought Hawthorne's job at the Custom House to an end. Urged by Sophia Peabody, who was greatly interested in the Transcendentalist movement, he joined the Brook Farm Community and invested his savings in it. He hoped to find a suitable place to begin married life, but after a few months he realized that living with a group of people made a lack of privacy inevitable, and he withdrew from the society.
He accepted a place as surveyor in the Salem Custom House, and while he was there he did no writing, but he was put out of this employment after four years by the maneuverings of local politicians. Shortly thereafter he wrote The Scarlet Letter (1850), which made him famous and assured his success as a writer. During the next two and a half years Hawthorne was at the height of his career. The House of the Seven Gables (1851); The Blithedale Romance (1852), drawn from Hawthorne's experiences at Brook Farm; a book of short stories, The Snow Image, and Other Tales (1851); and two children's classics, A Wonder Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), were all enthusiastically received. Hawthorne's literary success brought more financial security, and after spending a year and a half in Lenox in western Massachusetts (1850-1851), he purchased Bronson Alcott's house in Concord, named it "The Wayside," and moved into it in the spring of 1852.
Upon the accession to the presidency of his old college friend Franklin Pierce, for whom he wrote a campaign biography in 1852, Hawthorne was offered the consulship at Liverpool and Manchester, and so went abroad in 1853 for the first time. His reaction to England and Europe and his critical estimate of the English reveal an essential provincialism. At the same time he was more fully aware and appreciative of English culture and history than most Americans. The one romance that resulted from his foreign sojourn, The Marble Faun (1860), was peopled with the familiar Hawthorne characters and filled with minutely detailed but refreshing descriptions of Italian art. By some it is considered better as a guidebook to Rome than as a story. However, its theme, the humanizing of the faunlike Donatello through the consciousness of his crime, resembles the fate of Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter.
The Hawthornes returned to "The Wayside" in 1861. During his last years Hawthorne published a collection of essays, Our Old Home (1863), giving his impressions of England, and worked at four unfinished novels, Septimius Felton, The Ancestral Footstep, The Dolliver Romance, and Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, all published posthumously. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and was buried in Sleepy Hollow cemetery, Concord. Among his pallbearers were his publisher James T. Fields and his fellow writers Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, and Alcott.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was not a member of any formal religious organization, but religious thinking and religious imagery play a major role in his fiction. He was interested in the capacity of humans for evil. Hawthorne knew John Milton's Paradise Lost well and is reported to have had heated discussions with his older sister about Milton's portrayal of Satan in that poem.
Politics
Hawthorne was a Democrat and through his connections with the Democratic Party Hawthorne procured a political appointment in 1846 to be a Custom House surveyor in Salem, Massachusetts. Following the 1849 inauguration of Taylor, the president’s fellow Whig Party members accused Hawthorne of "corruption, iniquity and fraud." Hawthorne’s fierce fight to retain his government job was covered by partisan newspapers around the country, but he was ultimately let go in June 1849.
Views
Hawthorne was a skillful craftsman with an impressive arthitectonic sense of form. The structure of The Scarlet Letter, for example, is so tightly integrated that no chapter, no paragraph, even, could be omitted without doing violence to the whole. The book’s four characters are inextricably bound together in the tangled web of a life situation that seems to have no solution, and the tightly woven plot has a unity of action that rises slowly but inexorably to the climactic scene of Dimmesdale’s public confession. The same tight construction is found in Hawthorne’s other writings also, especially in the shorter pieces, or "tales." Hawthorne was also the master of a classic literary style that is remarkable for its directness, its clarity, its firmness, and its sureness of idiom.
Hawthorne inherited the Puritan tradition of moral earnestness, and he was deeply concerned with the concepts of original sin and guilt and the claims of law and conscience. Hawthorne rejected what he saw as the Transcendentalists’ transparent optimism about the potentialities of human nature. Instead he looked more deeply and perhaps more honestly into life, finding in it much suffering and conflict but also finding the redeeming power of love. There is no Romantic escape in his works, but rather a firm and resolute scrutiny of the psychological and moral facts of the human condition.
Hawthorne’s fictional characters’ actions and dilemmas fairly obviously express larger generalizations about the problems of human existence. But with Hawthorne this leads not to unconvincing pasteboard figures with explanatory labels attached but to a sombre, concentrated emotional involvement with his characters that has the power, the gravity, and the inevitability of true tragedy. His use of symbolism in The Scarlet Letter is particularly effective, and the scarlet letter itself takes on a wider significance and application that is out of all proportion to its literal character as a scrap of cloth.
Hawthorne’s work initiated the most durable tradition in American fiction, that of the symbolic romance that assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man’s choices. His greatest short stories and The Scarlet Letter are marked by a depth of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled by any American writer.
Quotations:
"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."
"Happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release."
"The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become."
Personality
As a general rule, Hawthorne was not comfortable or at ease in the company of groups of friends. Longfellow comments on this fact in his Journal, saying that, tete-a-tete, Hawthorne conversed easily and well, but that in a gathering he was silent. Nor was he at ease with other writers and scholars unless he could talk to them privately. Perhaps the long, discouraging years before his talents were recognized left him with a persistent sense of inadequacy in the company of successful writers. He felt, for instance, an exaggerated respect for the poetry of Longfellow, whose success had come quickly and easily; and he was long painfully conscious of his lack of firsthand knowledge of foreign lands, a knowledge possessed by many of his literary friends. Men of other professions, without a working knowledge of his craft, did not affect him in this manner; and his closest friends were Horatio Bridge and Franklin Pierce, who had no literary pretensions.
Quotes from others about the person
Sophia Hawthorne: "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."
Herman Melville: "It is curious, how a man may travel along a country road, and yet miss the grandest, or sweetest of prospects, by reason of an intervening hedge, so like all other hedges, as in no way to hint of the wide landscape beyond. So has it been with me concerning the enchanting landscape in the soul of this Hawthorne, this most excellent Man of Mosses."
Herman Melville: "I found that but to glean after this man, is better than to be in at the harvest of others."
Interests
Writers
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats
Connections
Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody on July 9, 1842 at a ceremony in the Peabody parlor on West Street in Boston.
After their marriage in 1842, they went for three years to Concord, where they resided at the Old Manse. Here the happiest years of Hawthorne's life were spent. The Hawthornes' first child, Una, was born in 1844. She was followed by Julian in 1846 and Rose in 1851.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Lessons from an Early American Homeschooler
In this book, Author Millie shares some of Hawthorne's important observations about education. He was a remarkable early American homeschooler, one whose life and writings contain lessons for everyone involved in true education. Millie ends each chapter with her own reflections inspired by the lessons from Hawthorne and her observations of education today.
2016
Hawthorne: A Life
In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein, brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them - he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters.
2003
Salem Is My Dwelling Place: Life Of Nathaniel Hawthorne
In this multidimensional biography of America's first great storyteller, Edwin Haviland Miller answers Hawthorne's challenge and reveals the inner landscapes of this modest, magnetic man who hid himself in his fiction. Thomas Woodson hails Miller's account as "the best biography of this most elusive of American authors."
1991
A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne remains one of the most widely read and taught of American authors. This Historical Guide collects a number of original essays by Hawthorne scholars that place the author in historical context. Like other volumes in the series, A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographical essay, and an illustrated chronology of the author's life and times. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, this volume addresses a wide range of topics relevant to Hawthorne's work, including his relationship to slavery, children, mesmerism, and the visual arts.
Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times
Winner of the 1983 National Book Award, James R. Mellow's magisterial biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne places America's first great writer in the midst of the literary and cultural turmoil of the early republic. Mellow draws on Hawthorne's letters and notebooks, as well as on perceptive readings of his fiction in recreating the details of Hawthorne's life: the long apprenticeship of the reclusive young author, his romantic courtship of Sophia Peabody, and his travels to Europe at the height of his literary career.