This Semester: Nathaniel Hawthorne

If you did not write a term paper on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, it is possible you did not go to high school in the United States. Having to write a comparison paper on The Scarlet Letter and Arthur Miller's The Crucible is almost as ubiquitous as having to memorize the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, or at least it was at one time.

Later on, if you went to an American college or university and took a literature course, you probably were hit with “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” “The Birthmark,” or “Young Goodman Brown,” the three most widely anthologized of Hawthorne’s short stories. Like The Scarlet Letter, these short stories are dark and haunting; Hawthorne’s vision of man is a moral one, and the plight of man is forever to battle his inclination toward sin. British writer D. H. Lawrence said, “The Scarlet Letter isn't a pleasant, pretty romance. It is a sort of parable, an earthly story with a hellish meaning.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on Independence Day, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts—an auspicious birthplace and one that would provide a gothic geography for his work. He attended Bowdoin College in Maine and was friends with a young man named Franklin Pierce, who would become the fourteenth president of the United States. Hawthorne was also at Bowdoin with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, although they were not close until much later.

Hawthorne lived in Concord, Massachusetts, for a few years in the Old Manse, which is located on the site of the Concord battlefield.  Later, he worked for the Custom House in Salem. Among his friends were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville, and his later works included The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance.

Hawthorne is buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. His grave and that of his wife, Sophie, are only a few meters away from those of Emerson and Thoreau. This 1862 portrait of Hawthorne, by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, is part of the collections at the National Portrait Gallery. 

—Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery