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Signature. Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion. He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that town. Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to ...
Oct 25, 2016 · Estimated reading time: 4 minutes On images of the Salem Witch Trials in historical romance, horror, and collective memory. Nathaniel Hawthorne famously complained, in the Preface to his novel The Marble Faun (1859), about “the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong.”
Dec 16, 2021 · Beneath the dark blue waves. On Nathaniel’s mother’s side of the family, Nathaniel’s grandfather Richard Manning Jr. founded the Boston and Salem Stagecoach Line, which all of his sons save for one continued to operate after Richard’s death in 1812. Manning left an estate valued in excess of $50,000, some $33,000 of this in real estate ...
May 19, 2011 · The House of the Seven Gables, romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1851. The work, set in mid-19th-century Salem, Mass., is a sombre study in hereditary sin, based on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne’s own family by a woman condemned to death during the infamous Salem witch trials. The greed and arrogance of the novel ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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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.”
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Writers’ Retreats
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Jul 16, 2005 · Hawthorne was still struggling to relieve himself of the heavy psychic burden of his family’s past. Puritanism had shaped his first full-length romance written in 1850, The Scarlet Letter, with its emphasis on secret sin, pride, vengefulness and shame. The House of the Seven Gables, in 1851, continued to deal with this burden in its opening ...
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Her family had a long history in Salem, and among Hawthorne’s ancestor was a judge in the Salem witch trials of 1692. During his childhood in Salem, Hawthorne acquired a love of reading, particularly of long prose works and early novels-as-genre by such writers as John Bunyan (1628–1688), Tobias Smollett (1721–1771), and Sir Walter Scott.
