Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1804-64
US novelist and short-story writer

He was born in Salem, Massachusetts. At the age of four he lost his father, and he and his mother lived in straitened circumstances. At the age of 14 he went with her to a lonely farm in the woods of Raymond, Maine, and there he and his reclusive mother lived a solitary life. He attended Bowdoin College, Brunswick, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a fellow pupil, and where he began his first novel in 1825. After his return to Salem he shut himself away for 12 years, writing tales and verses. His first novel, Fanshawe (1828), which was published anonymously, was unsuccessful. Continuing to contribute to annuals and magazines, such as The Token, he edited in 1836 a short-lived periodical. Meanwhile some of his short stories were favourably reviewed in the London Athenaeum, and were collected as Twice-told Tales (1837), but his talent was not yet appreciated in his own country. In 1839 the historian George Bancroft appointed him weigher and gauger in the customs-house, a post he held until 1841. In that year he spent several months at the Brook Farm, an idyllic, semi-socialistic community near Boston. Meanwhile he wrote and published a series of simple stories for children from New England history: Grandfather's Chair, Famous Old People and Liberty Tree (1841). Moving to Concord, Massachusetts, in 1842 he issued Biographical Stories for children, and brought out an enlarged edition of the Twice-told Tales (1842). His sketches and studies written for the Democratic Review were collected as Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The Review failed and, having lost all his savings at Brook Farm, he was forced to accept a place in the customs-house again - this time as surveyor in Salem. In 1850 he published The Scarlet Letter, still the best-known of his works. At Lenox, Massachusetts, he then entered upon a phase of remarkable productiveness, writing The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Wonder Book (1851), The Snow Image (1852) and The Blithedale Romance (1852), which drew upon his Brook Farm experience. He settled in Concord in 1852, and wrote a campaign biography of his old schoolfriend, President Franklin Pierce, and on Pierce's inauguration became consul at Liverpool (1853-57). He completed Tanglewood Tales in 1853, as a continuation of Wonder Book. A year and half spent in Rome and Florence, from 1858 to 1860, supplied him with the materials for The Marble Faun (1860), published in Great Britain as Transformation. Returning to Concord, he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly the brilliant papers on England collected as Our Old Home (1863). He began a new romance, based on the idea of an elixir of immortality, which remained unfinished at his death. Only belatedly recognized in his own country, his reputation has continued to grow in the 20th century.

Bibliography: F Crews, The Sins of the Fathers (1966); H James, Hawthorne (1879)