Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1804–1864)
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an unusually handsome man, with a loving and beloved wife. By midlife he had earned recognition as a writer and won the admiration of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, he became increasingly dissatisfied, remote, and disappointing to his friends. It was as if his dark insights into the human heart had cast gloom into his own. His fiction, which has survived the changing tastes of many generations and is more admired today than when it was written, is fueled by an awareness of the guilt that accompanies a Puritan conscience. This shadow of guilt appears to have darkened Hawthorne's life.
The source of darkness is thought to lie in Hawthorne's illustrious ancestors. William Hathorne, a serious soldier and judge, came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. William Hathorne's son, John, was also a judge. During the Salem witch trials of 1692, he played a minor role in sentencing nineteen of the accused to death.
By 1804, however, the year of Hawthorne's birth in Salem, the family had lost its wealth and renown. His own father, a sea captain, died during a voyage, leaving his grief-stricken wife with three young children to raise and few resources beyond the charity of relatives.
Hawthorne (who added the w to the family name to ensure a broad a in its pronunciation) attended schools in Salem and studied at Bowdoin College in Maine. Here, by his own judgment, he was an idle student. He chewed tobacco, played cards, drank wine at the taverns, and avoided intellectual company in favor of pleasure. After graduation, in a letter to his sister Elizabeth, Hawthorne claimed that he would never become distinguished but would simply remain one of the ordinary people. There is good reason to believe that this was an ironic statement, concealing an ambition that burned intensely.
Returning to Salem, Hawthorne set himself up in a room on the third floor of the family house. He kept himself a virtual prisoner there for the next twelve years, until he had learned the craft of fiction. In 1837, Hawthorne emerged to publish a collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales, which includes "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment." They offered a vision of the human heart as a lurking place for the secrets of past sins. The book won Hawthorne just enough success to encourage further work.
Over the next few years Hawthorne courted and became engaged to Sophia Peabody, and he briefly joined the utopian experiment in communal living at Brook Farm. But neither the shoveling of manure nor the endless, lofty discussions of the Transcendentalists appealed to him. After their marriage in 1842, the Hawthornes moved into the Old Manse in Concord, where Ralph Waldo Emerson had lived before them. It was during this time that Hawthorne wrote "Rappaccini's Daughter," which was published in 1846 in a collection called Mosses from an Old Manse.
Making only the barest living from his stories, Hawthorne had to accept a political appointment as a surveyor to the Salem customhouse in 1846. The job freed him from financial worry, but he hated the work. In 1849, he lost the job. Despite this loss and the simultaneous death of his mother, he somehow found the energies for his masterwork, The Scarlet Letter.
The novel's publication in 1850 brought Hawthorne wide acclaim, some money, and the admiration and friendship of Herman Melville. Another great novel, The House of the Seven Gables, appeared the following year.
In 1853, President Franklin Pierce—Hawthorne's old friend from his days at Bowdoin—offered Hawthorne the post of United States consul at Liverpool, England. Hawthorne and his family lived in Europe for seven years. As an expatriate, however, he found his creativity dwindling, and he had become inexplicably dejected. Even his return to America in 1860 was oddly cheerless. After his years abroad, he was disenchanted with both the Europe where he had been living and the America from which he now felt estranged.
Back in Concord, Hawthorne found himself unable to complete the several fiction projects he had promised his publisher. His health declined. On the night of May 18, 1864, Hawthorne died in a New Hampshire hotel room.
