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[[Image:Nathaniel_Hawthorne_old.jpg|thumb|right|180px|Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 1860s]]
'''Nathaniel Hawthorne''' ([[July 4]], [[1804]] – [[May 19]], [[1864]]) was a [[19th century]] [[United States|American]] [[the novel|novelist]] and [[short story]] writer. He is seen as a key figure in the development of [[American literature]].
==Biography==
He was born in [[Salem, Massachusetts]], where his [[Nathaniel Hawthorne Birthplace|birthplace]] is now a house museum, and died in [[Plymouth, New Hampshire]]. Hawthorne's father was a sea captain and descendant of [[John Hathorne]], one of the judges who oversaw the [[Salem Witch Trials]]. Hawthorne's father died at sea in 1808 of [[yellow fever]], when Hawthorne was only four years old, and Nathaniel was raised secluded from the world by his mother.
Hawthorne attended [[Bowdoin College]] in [[Maine]] from 1821–1824, befriending classmates [[Henry Wadsworth Longfellow]] and future president [[Franklin Pierce]]. Until the publication of his [[Twice-Told Tales]] in 1837, Hawthorne wrote in the comparative obscurity of what he called his "owl's nest" in the family home. As he looked back on this period of his life, he wrote: "I have not lived, but only dreamed about living" [letter to Longfellow, June 4, 1837]. And yet it was this period of brooding and writing that had formed, as [[Malcolm Cowley]] was to describe it, "the central fact in Hawthorne's career," his "term of apprenticeship" that would eventually result in the "richly meditated fiction."
Hawthorne was hired in 1839 as a weigher and gauger at the [[Boston, Massachusetts|Boston]] Custom House. He had become engaged in the previous year to the [[illustrator]] and [[Transcendentalism|transcendentalist]] [[Sophia Peabody]]. Seeking a possible home for himself and Sophia, he joined the transcendentalist [[utopian]] community at [[Brook Farm]] in 1841; later that year, however, he left when he became dissatisfied with the experiment. (His Brook Farm adventure would prove an inspiration for his novel, [[The Blithedale Romance]].) He married Sophia in 1842; they moved to [[The Old Manse]] in [[Concord, Massachusetts]], where they lived for three years. Hawthorne and his wife then moved to [[The Wayside]], previously a home of the Alcotts. Their neighbors in Concord included [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]] and [[Henry David Thoreau]].
[[Image:Nathaniel Hawthorne - Project Gutenberg eText 15161.jpg|thumbnail|left|180px|Nathaniel Hawthorne illustrated in an 1870 publication]]
Like Hawthorne, Sophia was a reclusive person. She was, in fact, bedridden with headaches until her sister introduced her to Hawthorne, after which her headaches seem to have abated. The Hawthornes enjoyed a long marriage, and Sophia was greatly enamored of her husband's work. In one of her journals, she writes: "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" [Jan 14th 1851, Journal of Sophia Hawthorne. Berg Collection NY Public Library].
In 1846 Hawthorne was appointed surveyor (determining the quantity and value of imported goods) at the Salem Custom House. Like his earlier appointment to the custom house in Boston, this employment was vulnerable to the politics of the [[spoils system]]. When Hawthorne later wrote [[The Scarlet Letter]], he included a long introductory essay depicting his time at the Salem Custom House. He lost this job due to the change of administration in Washington after the presidential election of 1848. In 1852 he wrote the [[campaign biography]] of his old friend, Franklin Pierce. With Pierce's election as president, Hawthorne was rewarded in 1853 with the position of United States consul in [[Liverpool]]. In 1857 he resigned from this post and did some traveling in France and Italy. He and his family returned to The Wayside in 1860. Failing health began to prevent him from completing new writings. Hawthorne died in his sleep on [[May 19]], [[1864]] in Plymouth, N.H. while on a tour of the White Mountains with Pierce.
Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne had three children: Una, Julian, and Rose. Una suffered from mental illness and died young. Julian moved out west and wrote a book about his father. Rose converted to Roman Catholicism and took her vows as a Dominican nun. She founded [http://www.hawthorne-dominicans.org/found.htm a religious order] to care for victims of cancer.
==Writings==
Hawthorne is best-known today for his many [[short story|short stories]] (he called them "tales") and his four major [[romance (genre)|romances]] of 1850–60: ''[[The Scarlet Letter]]'' (1850), ''[[The House of the Seven Gables]]'' (1851), ''[[The Blithedale Romance]]'' (1852), and ''[[The Marble Faun]]'' (1860). (Another book-length romance, ''[[Fanshawe (novel)|Fanshawe]]'', was published anonymously in 1828.)
Before publishing his first collection of tales in 1837, Hawthorne wrote scores of [[short story|short stories]] and sketches, publishing them anonymously or [[pseudonym|pseudonymously]] in periodicals such as ''The New-England Magazine'' and ''The United States Democratic Review''. Only after collecting a number of his short stories into the two-volume ''[[Twice-Told Tales]]'' in 1837 did Hawthorne begin to attach his name to his works.
Much of Hawthorne's work is set in colonial [[New England]], and many of his short stories have been read as moral [[allegory|allegories]] influenced by his [[Puritan]] background. "Ethan Brand" (1850) tells the story of a lime-burner who sets off to find the Unpardonable Sin, and in doing so, commits it. One of Hawthorne's most famous tales, "[[The Birth-Mark]]" (1843), concerns a young doctor who removes a birthmark from his wife's face, an operation which kills her. Other well-known tales include "[[Rappaccini's Daughter]]" (1844), "[[My Kinsman, Major Molineux]]" (1832), "[[The Minister's Black Veil]]" (1836), and "[[Young Goodman Brown]]" (1835). "The Maypole of [[Merrymount]]" recounts a most interesting encounter between the Puritans and the forces of anarchy and hedonism.
Recent criticism has focused on Hawthorne's narrative voice, treating it as a self-conscious [[rhetoric|rhetorical]] construction, not to be conflated with Hawthorne's own voice. Such an approach complicates the long-dominant tradition of regarding Hawthorne as a gloomy, guilt-ridden [[moralist]].
Hawthorne enjoyed a brief friendship with [[United States|American]] [[novelist]] [[Herman Melville]] beginning on [[August 5]] [[1850]], when the two authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend. Melville had just read Hawthorne's short story collection ''[[Mosses from an Old Manse]]'', which Melville later praised in a famous review, "Hawthorne and His Mosses." Melville's letters to Hawthorne provide insight into the composition of ''[[Moby-Dick]],'' which Melville dedicated to Hawthorne, 'in appreciation for his genius.' Hawthorne's letters to Melville did not survive.
[[Edgar Allan Poe]] wrote important, though largely unflattering reviews of both ''Twice-Told Tales'' and ''Mosses from an Old Manse''.
==See also==
* ''[[The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales]]''
==External links==
{{wikisource author}}
*Eric Eldred's [http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/hawthorne.html excellent Hawthorne site] at Eldritch Press contains all of Hawthorne's works, notes on the writings, annotated editions,and lots of other information.
*The [http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org Hawthorne in Salem Website] was funded in May of 2000 by a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a collaborative effort of North Shore Community College in Danvers, Massachusetts, and three Salem, Massachusetts museums with important Hawthorne collections.
*[[Herman Melville]]'s appreciation, [http://209.11.144.65/eldritchpress/nh/hahm.html "Hawthorne and His Mosses"] (1850)
*[[Henry James]]'s important book-length study, ''[http://209.11.144.65/eldritchpress/nh/nhhj1.html Hawthorne]'' (1879)
*WBUR's celebration of Nathaniel Hawthorne at 200, [http://www.wbur.org/arts/2005/48691_20050101.asp], with links to NPR's "The Connection" on Hawthorne's birthday, as well as an interview with author Phillip McFarland.
*{{gutenberg author|id=Nathaniel_Hawthorne|name=Nathaniel Hawthorne}}
[[Category:1804 births|Hawthorne, Nathaniel]]
[[Category:1864 deaths|Hawthorne, Nathaniel]]
[[Category:American novelists|Hawthorne, Nathaniel]]
[[Category:Massachusetts writers|Hawthorne, Nathaniel]]
[[Category:American short story writers|Hawthorne, Nathaniel]]
[[Category:Unitarian Universalists|Hawthorne, Nathaniel]]
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