Biography of nathaniel hawthorne
Biography of nathaniel hawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804 into an old Puritan family. Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825. He thereafter returned to his Salem home, living in semi-seclusion and writing. His work received little public recognition, however, and Hawthorne attempted to destroy all copies of his first novel, Fanshawe, which he had published at his own expense in 1828. During this period he also contributed articles and short stories to various periodicals. Several of the stories were published in Twice-Told Tales in 1837, which, although not a financial success, established Hawthorne as a leading writer. These early works are largely historical sketches and symbolic and allegorical tales dealing with moral conflicts and the effects of Puritanism on colonial New England.
Because Hawthorne was unable to earn a living by literary work, in 1839 Hawthorne took a job as weigher in the Boston, Massachusetts, customhouse. Two years later he returned to writing and produced a series of sketches of New England history for children, Grandfather's Chair: A History for Youth, which was published in 1841. The same year he joined the communal society at Brook Farm near Boston, hoping to be able to live in such comfort that he could marry and still have time to devote to his writing. The demands of the farm were too great, however, and Hawthorne was unable to continue his writing while doing farm chores, and after six months he withdrew from the community. In 1842 he married Sophia Amelia Peabody of Salem and settled in Concord, Massachusetts, in a house called the Old Manse. During the four years he lived in Concord, Hawthorne wrote a number of tales that were later published as Mosses from an Old Manse, published in 1846. They include Roger Malvin's Burial, Rappaccini's Daughter, and Young Goodman Brown, tales in which Hawthorne's preoccupation with the effects of pride, guilt, sin, and secrecy are combined with a continued emphasis on symbolism and allegory. His literary works are deeply concerned with the problems of ethics, of sin, and punishment. Hawthorne's exploration of these themes was related to the sense of guilt he felt about the roles of his ancestors in the 17th-century persecution of Quakers and in the 1692 witchcraft trials of Salem, Massachusetts.
To survive, Hawthorne returned to government service in 1846 as surveyor of the Salem customhouse. In 1849 he was dismissed because of a change in political administration. By then he had already begun writing The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, a novel about the adulterous Puritan Hester Prynne, who loyally refuses to reveal the name of her partner. Regarded as his masterpiece and as one of the classics of American literature,...
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