Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. When he was four, his father died on a while on a trip in Surinam, Dutch Guinea, but some of his mother’s relatives recognized his literary talent and helped pay for his education at Bowdoin College. He had some very important and successful classmates in both literature and government. He had such classmates as writer Horatio Bridge, future Senator Jonathan Ciley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and future President Franklin Pierce. These friends supplied Hawthorne with government employment in bad times, which gave him time to develop as an author, even though he later threw out his old writings because of his inexperience at the time.

Hawthorne's fiancйe Sophia Peabody drew him into "the newness," and in 1841 Hawthorne invested $1500 in the Brook Farm Utopian Community, but left in less than a year. His later works show some Transcendentalist influence, like his belief in individual choice and consequence, and an emphasis on symbolism. The Scarlet Letter would convey these ideas, showing the difference between the strict Puritan way of life with passion and individualism.

He married Sophia in 1842, and then they moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where they lived for three years. Hawthorne and his wife then moved to The Wayside, which used to be a home of the Alcotts. Their neighbors in Concord included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne had three children: Una, Julian, and Rose. Una suffered from mental illness and died young. Julian moved out west and wrote a book about his father. Rose converted to Roman Catholicism and took her vows as a Dominican nun. She founded a religious order to care for victims of cancer.

His Bowdoin classmate, Senator Jonathon Ciley, appointed Hawthorne as Measurer of Salt and Coal at the Boston Custom-House, but he lost his job in 1849 for “political reasons.” This made Hawthorne return to his writing, and "The Custom House" became the introduction to