Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter created a sensation in 1850. It was, Henry James later wrote, “absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England.” The Atlantic—launched in New England in 1857 to take up “the American idea”—should have been a natural home for its author.

His byline was welcomed, but the relationship proved fraught. Hawthorne’s personal views were detested in abolitionist Boston. Slavery, he had insisted, would eventually “vanish like a dream.” He had not “the slightest sympathy for the slaves,” he wrote a friend; “or, at least, not half as much as for the laboring whites, who, I believe, are ten times worse off than the Southern negroes.” 

His first big article, “Chiefly About War Matters,” ran in July 1862—five months after Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” had stirred Atlantic readers. Skewering the war effort and mocking Abraham Lincoln, Hawthorne riled his audience. The words “monkey figure of ‘Uncle Abe’” had to go, the editor decreed. Hawthorne consented but described his censors as sanctimonious prigs in accompanying notes. 

The Atlantic awaited fiction from Hawthorne to serialize. So did Hawthorne, in vain. “The Present, the Immediate, the Actual has proved too potent for me,” he wrote, ill and overwhelmed. “It takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for imaginative composition.”