Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804, into a family whose history weighed on him to an unusual degree. His great-great-grandfather John Hathorne had been one of the judges at the 1692 witch trials, the only one who never publicly repented, and Hawthorne was haunted by what he understood as a hereditary guilt. Sometime in his twenties he added the silent "w" to the family name — Hawthorne instead of Hathorne — a small typographical exorcism that put a little distance between him and the ancestor who had sent women to the gallows. His father, a ship's captain, died of yellow fever in Suriname when Nathaniel was four, and he grew up reserved, bookish, and largely cared for by his mother and sisters.

He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 — classmates included the future president Franklin Pierce and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow — then returned to his mother's house in Salem for what he later called twelve years of solitary apprenticeship. He wrote stories that drew on Puritan New England — guilt, hidden sin, the moral cost of secrecy — eventually collected as Twice-Told Tales (1837). He married Sophia Peabody in 1842 and moved to the Old Manse in Concord, where the Transcendentalist circle was at its peak: Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott. Hawthorne respected them and remained skeptical of their optimism, which he thought underestimated the persistence of human evil.

The Scarlet Letter (1850), written quickly after he lost his patronage job at the Salem Custom House, is the book by which he is mostly remembered. Hester Prynne, in seventeenth-century Boston, has borne a daughter out of wedlock and refuses to name the father; she is sentenced to wear the embroidered letter A on her dress as a permanent public shame. The father — the young minister Arthur Dimmesdale — destroys himself slowly with private guilt while Hester carries the visible punishment with dignity. The novel's moral architecture is more complicated than its reputation suggests: Hester is the most morally serious character in the book, and the official Puritan community is no one's hero.

The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852), based on his unhappy months at the utopian Brook Farm community, followed quickly. His friendship with Herman Melville, who lived briefly in the Berkshires while Hawthorne was there, was the most intense literary friendship of his life on Melville's side; Hawthorne was warmer than is sometimes claimed but more reserved than Melville wanted. In 1853 Pierce, now president, appointed Hawthorne US Consul in Liverpool, a lucrative position he held for four years.

He returned to America in 1860 in declining health and produced little of note before his death in 1864. His attitudes were complicated in ways readers still wrestle with: he wrote a sympathetic campaign biography of Pierce, a Northern doughface who was disastrous on slavery, and his own views on abolition were lukewarm where they should have been clear. The fiction is sharper than the politics. The fiction has lasted.