NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

4th July 1804

Salem, Massachusetts
~
19th May 1864
Plymouth, New Hampshire
 He had a Puritan ancestry:
it included William Hathorne, who was among the settlers who
arrived from England in 1630
and John Hathorne, a magistrate involved in the Salem witch trials
and who often dealt with adultery.
~
He decided to distance himself from the mentality of publicly
humiliating adulterers by adding a "w" in his last name.
At the age of four, he lost his father and his overprotective mother
influenced his childhood.
He grew up shy and bookish and this molded his life as a writer.
He oriented himself towards this career after graduating at Bowdoin
College.
~
His incomes were insufficient, so he was forced to find a job as a
measurer at the Salem Custom House.
~
In 1842, he earned enough to marry Sophia Peabody and to move to
The Manse in Concord.
 In 1845 he went back to Salem and devoted himself to his most
famous work, «The Scarlet Letter».
~
Influence of his ancestry:
Adultery is the main supporting theme in this work and it appears
also in a short story, «Endicott and the Red Cross», which involves
another woman forced to wear a scarlet "A".
~
Influence of his job:
In the introduction he writers that he found in a Custom House
some documents telling Hester Prynne's story and the embroided
letter she had to wear on her clothes.
~
«The Scarlet Letter» brought him success, as he was finally able to
write for a living, and the support of his family and friends.
Hawthorne continued his career writing other novels as «The House
of the Seven Gables» (1851) and «The Blithedale Romance»
(1852).
~
He traveled in France and Italy, coming back just before the Civil War,
about which he wrote the article «Chiefly About War Matters»
before falling ill.
~
After his death, he left a number of unfinished works which had
been published posthumously.
 «Memories of Hawthorne», Rose Hawthorne Lathrop.

He did not write only for the pleasure of it, but considering his
moral purposes and artistic harmony. He pitied and loved
human nature and he wished for it to redeem itself.
When he portrayed a "human devil", he stressed its humanity,
as he believed that the real devil is a different thing.

«His quality was philosophy, his style forgiveness».