Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). The son of a merchant sea–captain who died in a distant port when Nathaniel was four, Hawthorne grew up in genteel poverty in Massachusetts and Maine. His earliest American ancestor, the magistrate William Hathorne, ordered the whipping of a Quaker woman in Salem. William’s son John was one of the three judges at the Salem witch trials of 1692.
Aware of his family’s role in colonial America, Hawthorne returned to Salem after graduating from Bowdoin College (where future president Franklin Pierce was a friend and classmate), determined to be a writer. He recalled and destroyed copies of his first novel, the mediocre Fanshawe (1828). His short stories, often set in Puritan America, revealed a moral complexity that had not troubled his righteous ancestors William and John.
His success as an author allowed him to marry Sophia Peabody in 1842 after a four–year engagement. Though his stories were critically praised, they did not earn much money, and, in 1846, he used his political connections with the Democratic party to obtain a job at the Salem custom house. His dismissal in 1849 (when the Democrats lost) produced both anger and resolve. The result was a great American novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), which made him famous and improved his fortune.
Although he was friendly with Emerson and his circle of optimistic transcendentalists (some of whom established the utopian socialist community at Brook Farm), Hawthorne's vision of the human condition was considerably darker. Herman Melville dedicated Moby Dick to Hawthorne, and characterized him as a man who could say “No” in thunder.
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