Bookatlas
1804–1864North America
Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

United States

Dark, allegorical prose weighted with symbol and moral shadow: sentences that read Puritan New England as a landscape of buried, inherited guilt.

Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, descended from the Puritan judge John Hathorne, who condemned accused witches to death; he added a 'w' to his surname to distance himself from the name. At Bowdoin College he formed a lasting friendship with the future president Franklin Pierce and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

He spent years working obscure posts in the Salem and Boston customhouses, briefly joined the utopian Brook Farm commune, and married the painter Sophia Peabody before The Scarlet Letter, written after he lost his customs job, made him famous in 1850. Pierce later rewarded their friendship with a consulship in Liverpool, funding years abroad in England and Italy that produced The Marble Faun.

His intense friendship with Herman Melville, his neighbor in the Berkshires during the writing of Moby-Dick, cooled after a few years; Hawthorne died in 1864 on a trip through the New Hampshire mountains with Pierce.

The American Renaissance

Their books in the atlas

  1. 1850
    Cover of The Scarlet Letter
    The Scarlet Letter
    Lvl 7gothic
  2. 1851
    Cover of The House of the Seven Gables
    The House of the Seven Gables
    Lvl 7gothic

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