Biography Of Nataniel Hawthorne :: essays research papers fc

Born in Salem, Mass, Nathaniel Hawthorne was a descendant of a judge in the Salem witch trials. He spent a solitary, bookish childhood with his widowed and antisocial mother. After graduating from Bowdoin College, he returned to Salem and prepared for a writing career with 12 years of solitary study and writing interrupted by summer tours through the Northeast. After privately publishing a novel, Fanshawe in 1828, he began publishing stories in the Token and New England Magazine. These original allegories of New England Puritanism, including such classic stories as "The Minister's Black Veil," were collected in, Twice-Told Tales, published in 1837. A brief period of paid employment, including the compilation of popular children's works and a stint at the Boston Custom House from 1839-to 1841, was followed by a half-year's residence at the transcendentalist community, Brook Farm. In 1842 he married Sophia Amelia Peabody, also a transcendentalist, and they moved to Concord, Mass., where he began a friendship with Henry David Thoreau. Financial problems forced his return to Salem from 1845 to 1849, where he secured another political appointment, this time as surveyor of the port of Salem. During these years he continued to publish Puritan tales such as, "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Birthmark"; collections of his stories included Mosses from an Old Manse published in 1846 and The Snow Image published in1851. His dismissal from the surveyorship initiated the brief period of his greatest novels: The Scarlet Letter in 1850, The House of the Seven Gables in 1851, and The Blithdale Romance in 1852. He also wrote two children's classics: A Wonder-Book in 1852 and Tanglewood Tales in 1853. His campaign biography of Franklin Pierce in 1852 was rewarded with the U.S. counsulship at Liverpool 1853 to 1858. He then went to live in Italy in 1858 to 1859, where he began The Marble Faun, which he published after returning to the United States in 1860. Back in Concord, he published his last major work, Our Old Home in 1863, which drew on his experiences in England, but by then he was becoming ill and disillusioned. Nathaniel Hawthorne was an average man who saw things, not necessarily in a different way, but in a different light. He was able to use this ability and transform it onto paper. He would begin to write and slowly but almost definitely become emotionally involved by the end of the novel or short story.