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Nov 15, 2024 · Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on 4 July 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, the second of three children; he had two sisters Elizabeth and Louisa. His early life was spent reading, most often alone. When Hawthorne was four years old in 1808, his father died of yellow fever, causing his mother to become reclusive.
- Overview
- Early years
- First works
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) is regarded as one of the greatest fiction writers in American literature. He was a skillful craftsman with an architectonic sense of form, as displayed in the tightly woven structure of his works, and a master of prose style, which he used to clearly reveal his characters’ psychological and moral depths.
What was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s family like?
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s family had lived in Salem, Massachusetts, since the 1600s. One ancestor was a magistrate who, in staunchly defending Puritanism, sentenced a Quaker woman to public whipping. Another was a judge in the Salem witch trials. During the 1700s the family went into decline—perhaps, Nathaniel was to think, because of his ancestors’ behaviour.
What did Nathaniel Hawthorne do for a living?
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a writer but struggled to make a living from his writing. To make ends meet, he resorted to working as a customs officer in Boston, living briefly at the utopian commune Brook Farm, and serving as U.S. consul in Liverpool, Lancashire.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (born July 4, 1804, Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 19, 1864, Plymouth, New Hampshire) American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale. One of the greatest fiction writers in American literature, he is best known for The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
Hawthorne’s ancestors had lived in Salem since the 17th century. His earliest American ancestor, William Hathorne (Nathaniel added the w to the name when he began to write), was a magistrate who had sentenced a Quaker woman to public whipping. He had acted as a staunch defender of Puritan orthodoxy, with its zealous advocacy of a “pure,” unaffected...
In college Hawthorne had excelled only in composition and had determined to become a writer. Upon graduation, he had written an amateurish novel, Fanshawe, which he published at his own expense—only to decide that it was unworthy of him and to try to destroy all copies. Hawthorne, however, soon found his own voice, style, and subjects, and within five years of his graduation he had published such impressive and distinctive stories as “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “An Old Woman’s Tale.” By 1832, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” two of his greatest tales—and among the finest in the language—had appeared. “Young Goodman Brown,” perhaps the greatest tale of witchcraft ever written, appeared in 1835.
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 (1839–40) and for six months in 1841 was a resident at the agricultural cooperative Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Even when his first signed book, Twice-Told Tales, was published in 1837, the work had brought 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 the Old Manse in Concord and began a happy three-year period that Hawthorne would later record in his essay “The Old Manse.”
Britannica Quiz
Writers’ Retreats
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- 3 min
- He was the college classmate of another famous writer—and a president. In addition to meeting future president Franklin Pierce while attending Maine’s Bowdoin College, Hawthorne was a fellow member of the class of 1825 with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
- He changed his last name in part to hide his family’s dark past. The novelist’s great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was a leading judge of the Salem witch trials, and Hawthorne was haunted by his ancestor’s shameful past.
- Hawthorne was the founding member of a utopian commune. In 1841, Hawthorne became a charter member of Brook Farm, an agricultural collective founded by Unitarian minister George Ripley near Boston.
- He lived in the same houses as two other famed Transcendental authors. In 1842, Hawthorne and his newlywed wife, Sophia, moved into the Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, a homestead in which Ralph Waldo Emerson had previously composed the first draft of “Nature,” the essay that launched the Transcendental movement.
Nov 8, 2024 · In 1838, Hawthorne became engaged to Sophia Peabody, a painter and intellectual. In need of a steady income to support his future family, he worked at the Boston Custom House and briefly joined Brook Farm, a utopian transcendentalist community. However, Hawthorne found the communal lifestyle unappealing, preferring solitude and quiet for his work.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was a nineteenth-century American novelist and short story writer. He is recognized, with his close contemporaries Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, as a key figure in the development of a distinctly American literature. Like Melville, Hawthorne was preoccupied with New England 's religious past.
Web. 24 Nov. 2015. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, one of three children to Elizabeth and Nathaniel Hathorne and spent his childhood in Salem, Massachusetts. His father died due to yellow fever in 1808, and Hawthorne struggled to come to terms with his father’s death and isolated himself in an attic for months.
Jan 22, 2018 · Updated on January 22, 2018. Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the most admired American authors of the 19th century, and his reputation has endured to the present day. His novels, including The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, are widely read in schools. A native of Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne often incorporated the history ...
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