Nathaniel Hawthorne
1 book analyzed
Biography
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, into a family with deep and troubling Puritan roots. His great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was one of the judges at the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 — the only judge who never repented. Another ancestor, William Hathorne, was a magistrate who ordered a Quaker woman publicly whipped. Hawthorne added the 'w' to his surname, according to family tradition, partly to distance himself from these forebears — though the gesture was more literary than effective. He worked in the Salem Custom House from 1846 to 1849, when political appointment changes under the incoming Whig administration cost him his job. This enforced leisure (and financial desperation) produced the conditions for The Scarlet Letter. He finished it in 1849 and published it in 1850 — one of the fastest-written and most carefully constructed novels in American literature. He described the book's composition as a period of extraordinary intensity: he reportedly wept while reading the ending to his wife Sophia.