Nathaniel Hawthorne

Born in Salem as Nathaniel Hawthorne, the future author of The Scarlet Letter and more than 100 short stories was descended from members of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. His great-great-grandfather was the notorious John Hawthorne, the so-called “hanging judge” who oversaw the Salem witch trials. Largely raised in Raymond, Maine, Hawthorne returned to Salem after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1821, where he became acquainted with poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future President Franklin Pierce. In Salem, Hawthorne embarked on his career as a writer in almost suffocating solitude. Other than his two sisters, he saw few people and was shy to a fault. But his inner musings never ceased, and he filled notebooks with ideas for stories. Other than the youthful and anonymous novel Fanshawe, Hawthorne’s rise as one of the greatest of American authors began with the short story collection Twice-Told Tales, of which Longfellow wrote a glowing review. Married to Sophia Peabody in 1838, Hawthorne labored in relative obscurity until the publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850 made him an international celebrity. That same year, he met Herman Melville, who dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne. The next four years were an especially productive period, during which he wrote The House of the Seven Gables, The Snow-Image, The Blithesdale Romance, and Tanglewood Tales, as well as the campaign biography of his old friend Franklin Pierce. Hawthorne spent his later years serving as a consul in Liverpool and traveled through England, France, and Italy, a journey that produced a great deal of travel writing, as well as inspiring his last published novel The Marble Faun. Hawthorne died in his sleep in 1864 while touring the White Mountains. One of the pallbearers was Hawthorne’s former neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, who remarked “I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more fully rendered—in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, and he died of it.” Hawthorne’s own assessment was even bleaker, writing that “I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.”