Nathaniel Hawthorne (born July 4, 1804, Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 19, 1864, Plymouth, New Hampshire) is one of the greatest fiction writers of 19th-century American literature. A master of the allegorical and symbolic tale, he remains best known for the novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Ancestry and early years

Hawthorne’s ancestors had lived in Salem, Massachusetts, since the 17th century. His earliest American ancestor was William Hathorne, a magistrate who was a staunch defender of Puritan orthodoxy, with its zealous advocacy of a “pure,” unaffected form of religious worship, its rigid adherence to a simple, almost severe, mode of life, and its conviction of the “natural depravity” of “fallen” humankind. (Hawthorne added a w to his surname when he began to write.) Among Hathorne’s actions as magistrate was sentencing a Quaker woman to public whipping.

Hawthorne was later to wonder whether the decline of his family’s prosperity and prominence during the 18th century, while other Salem families were growing wealthy from the lucrative shipping trade, might not be a retribution for this act and for the role of William Hathorne’s son John as one of three judges in the Salem witchcraft trials that began in 1692.

When Nathaniel’s father—a ship’s captain—died during one of his voyages, he left his young widow without means to care for her two girls and Nathaniel, who was four years old. She moved in with her affluent brothers, the Mannings. Hawthorne grew up in their house in Salem and, for extensive periods during his teens, in Raymond, Maine, on the shores of Sebago Lake.

He returned to Salem in 1825 after four years at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Hawthorne did not distinguish himself as a young man. Instead, he spent nearly a dozen years reading and trying to master the art of writing fiction.

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First works and the Transcendentalists

In college Hawthorne had excelled only in composition and had decided to become a writer. Upon graduation, he wrote Fanshawe, a novel that he published at his own expense—and then tried to destroy all copies after deciding it was unworthy of him.

Hawthorne, however, soon found his own voice, style, and subjects, and within five years of his graduation he had published “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “An Old Woman’s Tale”, both notable short stories. By 1832, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” considered two of his greatest tales, had been published. “Young Goodman Brown,” a gripping tale of witchcraft, appeared in 1835.

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His increasing success in placing his stories brought him a little fame. Unwilling to depend any longer on his uncles’ generosity, he turned to a job in the Boston Custom House, which he held from 1839 to 1840, and for six months in 1841 he was a resident at the agricultural cooperative Brook Farm, a utopian experiment in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Even when the first book to be published under his name, Twice-Told Tales, was released in 1837, he gained gratifying recognition but no dependable income.

By 1842, however, Hawthorne’s writing had brought him a sufficient income to allow him to marry Sophia Peabody. The couple rented a house called the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, and they began a happy three-year period that Hawthorne would later record in his essay “The Old Manse.”

The presence in Concord of some of the leading social thinkers and philosophers of his day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, made the village the center of the philosophy of Transcendentalism, which encouraged individuals to transcend the materialistic world of experience and facts and become conscious of the pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities for human freedom. Hawthorne welcomed the companionship of his Transcendentalist neighbors, but he had little to say to them. Artists and intellectuals never inspired his full confidence, but he thoroughly enjoyed the visit of his old college friend and classmate Franklin Pierce, later to become president of the United States.

At the Old Manse, Hawthorne continued to write stories, with the same result as before: literary success, monetary failure. His new short-story collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, appeared in 1846.