Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July fourth, 1804, He grew up in Salem, Massachusetts and Raymond, Maine.
Salem
Puritanical Salem
Biography
He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a "w" to make his name "Hawthorne" in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824,[1] and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. He published several short stories in various periodicals which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at aCustom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children.
EARLY LIFE
Nathaniel Hathorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts; his birthplace is preserved and open to the public.William Hathorne, the author's great-great-great-grandfather, a Puritan, was the first of the family to emigrate from England, first settling inDorchester, Massachusetts before moving to Salem. There he became an important member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and held many political positions including magistrate and judge, becoming infamous for his harsh sentencing. William's son and the author's great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the judges who oversaw theSalem 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, in an effort to dissociate himself from his notorious forebears. Hawthorne's father, Nathaniel Hathorne, Sr., was a sea captain who died in 1808 of yellow fever in Suriname.After his death, young Nathaniel, his mother and two sisters moved in with maternal relatives, the Mannings, in Salem, where they lived for 10 years. During this time, on November 10, 1813, young Hawthorne was hit on the leg while playing "bat and ball" and became lame and bedridden for a year, though several physicians could find nothing wrong with him.
EARLY CAREER
After four years at Bowdoin College Hawthorn Returned to Salem and published the novel Fanshawe. This was his first work and he later regretted publishing it; deeming it unworthy of him, he attempted to destroy all copies.
Hawthorne then went on to write The Hollow of the Three Hills, An Old Woman's Tale, and by 1832 two of his greatest tales My Kinsman, Major Molineux, andRoger Malvin's Burial. By 1835 Nathaniel Hawthorne published what is perhaps one of the greatest tales of witchcraft ever written, Young Goodman Brown.
In 1837 he published his first signed book, Twice-Told Tales, and reaped little financial reward. By 1842 his writing was producing sufficient income so as to allow him to marry Sophia Peabody with whom he later rented the Old Manse in Concord. He later recorded a happy three year period there in his essay The Old Manse. He continued to write stories at the Old Manse with the same results as before. "Literary success, financial failure." He published in 1846 his collection of short stories, Mosses From an Old Manse, in two volumes, it included the Rappaccinni's Daughter.
Hawthorn was compelled to return to Salem in 1845 by a growing family and mounting debt, where he was appointed Surveyor of the Custom House. Three years later he lost his job and in 1850 he produced The Scarlet Letter,
which made him famous. The Scarlet Letter was eventually recognized as one of Americas greatest Novels.
In 1851 he relocated his family to West Newton and wrote, in 1852, The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorn works also include children's books. In 1851 he published A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys and ,in 1853, Tanglewood tales for Girls and Boys.
Nathaniel Hawthorn was then, in 1853, appointed to the consulship in Liverpool, England by his old college friend, President Franklin Pierce. Our Old Home, published in 1863, is based on hi experiences in England. He spent 1857 to 1858 sightseeing in Italy, the result was The Marble Faun which he published in 1860.
Nathaniel Hawthorn Died on May 18, 1864 in Plymouth, New Hampshire.
Hawthorn's work reflected his puritanical heritage and contrasted sharply with the work of his neighbors, the optimistic transcendentalist.
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY
While at Bowdoin, Hawthorne bet his friend Jonathan Cilley a bottle of Madeira wine that Cilley would get married before he did.By 1836 he had won the wager, but did not remain a bachelor for life. After public flirtations with local women Mary Silsbee and Elizabeth Peabody,he began pursuing the latter's sister, illustrator and transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. Seeking a possible home for himself and Sophia, he joined the transcendentalist Utopian community at Brook Farm in 1841 not because he agreed with the experiment but because it helped him save money to marry Sophia. He paid a $1,000 deposit and was put in charge of shoveling the hill of manure referred to as "the Gold Mine". He left later that year, though his Brook Farm adventure would prove an inspiration for his novel The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody on July 9, 1842, at a ceremony in the Peabody parlor on West Street in Boston. The couple moved to The Old Mansein Concord, Massachusetts, they lived for three years. His neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, invited him into his social circle, but Hawthorne was almost pathologically shy and stayed silent when at gatherings. At the Old Manse, Hawthorne wrote most of the tales collected inMosses from an Old Manse.
MIDDLE YEARS
In April 1846, Hawthorne was officially appointed as the "Surveyor for the District of Salem and Beverly and Inspector of the Revenue for the Port of Salem" at an annual salary of $1,200. He had difficulty writing during this period, as he admitted to Longfellow: "I am trying to resume my pen... Whenever I sit alone, or walk alone, I find myself dreaming about stories, as of old; but these forenoons in the Custom House undo all that the afternoons and evenings have done. I should be happier if I could write". 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 wrote a letter of protest to the Boston Daily Advertiser which was attacked by the Whigs and supported by the Democrats, making Hawthorne's dismissal a much-talked about event in New England. Hawthorne was deeply affected by the death of his mother shortly thereafter in late July, calling it, "the darkest hour I ever lived". Hawthorne was appointed the corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum in 1848. Guests that came to speak that season included Emerson, Thoreau, Louis Agassiz and Theodore Parker.
Hawthorne returned to writing and published The Scarlet Letter in mid-March 1850, including a preface which refers to his three-year tenure in the Custom House and makes several allusions to local politicians, who did not appreciate their treatment. One of the first mass-produced books in America, it sold 2,500 volumes within ten days and earned Hawthorne $1,500 over 14 years. The book was immediately pirated by booksellers in London and became an immediate best-seller in the United States; it initiated his most lucrative period as a writer.One of Hawthorne's friends, the critic Edwin Percy Whipple, objected to the novel's "morbid intensity" and its dense psychological details, writing that the book "is therefore apt to become, like Hawthorne, too painfully anatomical in his exhibition of them", though 20th century writer D. H. Lawrence said that there could be no more perfect work of the American imagination than The Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne and his family moved to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts at the end of March 1850.Hawthorne became friends with Herman Melville beginning on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend.Melville had just read Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse, and his unsigned review of the collection, titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", was printed in The Literary World on August 17 and August 24. Melville, who was composing Moby-Dick at the time, wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black". Melville dedicated Moby-Dick (1851) to Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne."
Hawthorne's time in The Berkshires was very productive. The House of the Seven Gables (1851), which poet and critic James Russell Lowell said was better than The Scarlet Letter and called "the most valuable contribution to New England history that has been made" and The Blithedale Romance (1852), his only work written in the first person, were written here. He also published in 1851 a collection of short stories retelling myths, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, a book he had been thinking about writing since 1846. Nevertheless, the poet Ellery Channing reported that Hawthorne "has suffered much living in this place".Though the family enjoyed the scenery of The Berkshires, Hawthorne did not enjoy the winters in their small red house. They left on November 21, 1851. Hawthorne noted, "I am sick to death of Berkshire... I have felt languid and dispirited, during almost my whole residence.
LITERARY STYLE AND THEMES
Literary style and themesHawthorne's works belong to romanticism or, more specifically, dark romanticism,cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity.Many of his works are inspired by Puritan New England,[88] combining historical romance loaded with symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism.His depictions of the past are a version of historical fiction used only as a vehicle to express common themes of ancestral sin, guilt and retribution. His later writings also reflect his negative view of the Transcendentalism movement.
Hawthorne was predominantly a short story writer in his early career. Upon publishing Twice-Told Tales, however, he noted, "I do not think much of them", and he expected little response from the public.His four major romances were 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. Hawthorne defined a romance as being radically different from a novel by not being concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience.In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne describes his romance-writing as using "atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture."
Hawthorne also wrote nonfiction. In 2008, The Library of America selected Hawthorne's "A Collection of Wax Figures" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.
Novels
EARLY LIFE
Nathaniel Hathorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts; his birthplace is preserved and open to the public.William Hathorne, the author's great-great-great-grandfather, a Puritan, was the first of the family to emigrate from England, first settling inDorchester, Massachusetts before moving to Salem. There he became an important member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and held many political positions including magistrate and judge, becoming infamous for his harsh sentencing. William's son and the author's great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the judges who oversaw theSalem 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, in an effort to dissociate himself from his notorious forebears. Hawthorne's father, Nathaniel Hathorne, Sr., was a sea captain who died in 1808 of yellow fever in Suriname.After his death, young Nathaniel, his mother and two sisters moved in with maternal relatives, the Mannings, in Salem, where they lived for 10 years. During this time, on November 10, 1813, young Hawthorne was hit on the leg while playing "bat and ball" and became lame and bedridden for a year, though several physicians could find nothing wrong with him.
EARLY CAREER
After four years at Bowdoin College Hawthorn Returned to Salem and published the novel Fanshawe. This was his first work and he later regretted publishing it; deeming it unworthy of him, he attempted to destroy all copies.
Hawthorne then went on to write The Hollow of the Three Hills, An Old Woman's Tale, and by 1832 two of his greatest tales My Kinsman, Major Molineux, andRoger Malvin's Burial. By 1835 Nathaniel Hawthorne published what is perhaps one of the greatest tales of witchcraft ever written, Young Goodman Brown.
In 1837 he published his first signed book, Twice-Told Tales, and reaped little financial reward. By 1842 his writing was producing sufficient income so as to allow him to marry Sophia Peabody with whom he later rented the Old Manse in Concord. He later recorded a happy three year period there in his essay The Old Manse. He continued to write stories at the Old Manse with the same results as before. "Literary success, financial failure." He published in 1846 his collection of short stories, Mosses From an Old Manse, in two volumes, it included the Rappaccinni's Daughter.
Hawthorn was compelled to return to Salem in 1845 by a growing family and mounting debt, where he was appointed Surveyor of the Custom House. Three years later he lost his job and in 1850 he produced The Scarlet Letter,
which made him famous. The Scarlet Letter was eventually recognized as one of Americas greatest Novels.
In 1851 he relocated his family to West Newton and wrote, in 1852, The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorn works also include children's books. In 1851 he published A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys and ,in 1853, Tanglewood tales for Girls and Boys.
Nathaniel Hawthorn was then, in 1853, appointed to the consulship in Liverpool, England by his old college friend, President Franklin Pierce. Our Old Home, published in 1863, is based on hi experiences in England. He spent 1857 to 1858 sightseeing in Italy, the result was The Marble Faun which he published in 1860.
Nathaniel Hawthorn Died on May 18, 1864 in Plymouth, New Hampshire.
Hawthorn's work reflected his puritanical heritage and contrasted sharply with the work of his neighbors, the optimistic transcendentalist.
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY
While at Bowdoin, Hawthorne bet his friend Jonathan Cilley a bottle of Madeira wine that Cilley would get married before he did.By 1836 he had won the wager, but did not remain a bachelor for life. After public flirtations with local women Mary Silsbee and Elizabeth Peabody,he began pursuing the latter's sister, illustrator and transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. Seeking a possible home for himself and Sophia, he joined the transcendentalist Utopian community at Brook Farm in 1841 not because he agreed with the experiment but because it helped him save money to marry Sophia. He paid a $1,000 deposit and was put in charge of shoveling the hill of manure referred to as "the Gold Mine". He left later that year, though his Brook Farm adventure would prove an inspiration for his novel The Blithedale Romance. Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody on July 9, 1842, at a ceremony in the Peabody parlor on West Street in Boston. The couple moved to The Old Mansein Concord, Massachusetts, they lived for three years. His neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, invited him into his social circle, but Hawthorne was almost pathologically shy and stayed silent when at gatherings. At the Old Manse, Hawthorne wrote most of the tales collected inMosses from an Old Manse.
MIDDLE YEARS
In April 1846, Hawthorne was officially appointed as the "Surveyor for the District of Salem and Beverly and Inspector of the Revenue for the Port of Salem" at an annual salary of $1,200. He had difficulty writing during this period, as he admitted to Longfellow: "I am trying to resume my pen... Whenever I sit alone, or walk alone, I find myself dreaming about stories, as of old; but these forenoons in the Custom House undo all that the afternoons and evenings have done. I should be happier if I could write". 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 wrote a letter of protest to the Boston Daily Advertiser which was attacked by the Whigs and supported by the Democrats, making Hawthorne's dismissal a much-talked about event in New England. Hawthorne was deeply affected by the death of his mother shortly thereafter in late July, calling it, "the darkest hour I ever lived". Hawthorne was appointed the corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum in 1848. Guests that came to speak that season included Emerson, Thoreau, Louis Agassiz and Theodore Parker.
Hawthorne returned to writing and published The Scarlet Letter in mid-March 1850, including a preface which refers to his three-year tenure in the Custom House and makes several allusions to local politicians, who did not appreciate their treatment. One of the first mass-produced books in America, it sold 2,500 volumes within ten days and earned Hawthorne $1,500 over 14 years. The book was immediately pirated by booksellers in London and became an immediate best-seller in the United States; it initiated his most lucrative period as a writer.One of Hawthorne's friends, the critic Edwin Percy Whipple, objected to the novel's "morbid intensity" and its dense psychological details, writing that the book "is therefore apt to become, like Hawthorne, too painfully anatomical in his exhibition of them", though 20th century writer D. H. Lawrence said that there could be no more perfect work of the American imagination than The Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne and his family moved to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts at the end of March 1850.Hawthorne became friends with Herman Melville beginning on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend.Melville had just read Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse, and his unsigned review of the collection, titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses", was printed in The Literary World on August 17 and August 24. Melville, who was composing Moby-Dick at the time, wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black". Melville dedicated Moby-Dick (1851) to Hawthorne: "In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne."
Hawthorne's time in The Berkshires was very productive. The House of the Seven Gables (1851), which poet and critic James Russell Lowell said was better than The Scarlet Letter and called "the most valuable contribution to New England history that has been made" and The Blithedale Romance (1852), his only work written in the first person, were written here. He also published in 1851 a collection of short stories retelling myths, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, a book he had been thinking about writing since 1846. Nevertheless, the poet Ellery Channing reported that Hawthorne "has suffered much living in this place".Though the family enjoyed the scenery of The Berkshires, Hawthorne did not enjoy the winters in their small red house. They left on November 21, 1851. Hawthorne noted, "I am sick to death of Berkshire... I have felt languid and dispirited, during almost my whole residence.
LITERARY STYLE AND THEMES
Literary style and themesHawthorne's works belong to romanticism or, more specifically, dark romanticism,cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity.Many of his works are inspired by Puritan New England,[88] combining historical romance loaded with symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism.His depictions of the past are a version of historical fiction used only as a vehicle to express common themes of ancestral sin, guilt and retribution. His later writings also reflect his negative view of the Transcendentalism movement.
Hawthorne was predominantly a short story writer in his early career. Upon publishing Twice-Told Tales, however, he noted, "I do not think much of them", and he expected little response from the public.His four major romances were 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. Hawthorne defined a romance as being radically different from a novel by not being concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience.In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne describes his romance-writing as using "atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture."
Hawthorne also wrote nonfiction. In 2008, The Library of America selected Hawthorne's "A Collection of Wax Figures" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.
Novels
- Fanshawe (published anonymously, 1828)[104]
- The Scarlet Letter (1850)
- The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
- The Blithedale Romance (1852)
- The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860) (as Transformation: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni, UK publication, same year)
- The Dolliver Romance (1863) (unfinished)
- Septimius Felton; or, the Elixir of Life (Published in the Atlantic Monthly, 1872)
- Doctor Grimshawe's Secret: A romance (unfinished), with Preface and Notes by Julian Hawthorne (1882)
- Twice-Told Tales (1837)
- Grandfather's Chair (1840)
- Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)
- The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales (1852)
- A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852)
- Tanglewood Tales (1853)
- The Dolliver Romance and Other Pieces (1876)
- The Great Stone Face and Other Tales of the White Mountains (1889)
- The Celestial Railroad and Other Short Stories
- "Roger Malvin's Burial" (1832)
- "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832)
- "Young Goodman Brown" (1835)
- "The Gray Champion" (1835)
- "The White Old Maid" (1835)
- "Wakefield" (1835)
- "The Ambitious Guest" (1835)
- "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836)
- "The Man of Adamant" (1837)
- "The Maypole of Merry Mount" (1837)
- "The Great Carbuncle" (1837)
- "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" (1837)
- "A Virtuoso's Collection" (May 1842)
- "The Birth-Mark" (March 1843)
- "Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent" (1843)
- "The Artist of the Beautiful" (1846)
- "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844)
- "P.'s Correspondence" (1845)
- "Ethan Brand" (1850)
- "Feathertop" (1852)
All biography was provided by wikipedia