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Nathaniel Hawthorne
Date: 1936
From: Dictionary of American Biography
Publisher: Gale
Document Type: Biography
Length: 4,549 words
Content Level: (Level 5)
Lexile Measure: 1350L

About this Person

Born: July 04, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, United States
Died: May 19, 1864 in Plymouth, New Hampshire, United States
Nationality: American
Occupation: Writer
Full Text:
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (July 4, 1804 - May 18 or 19, 1864), novelist, was born in Salem, Mass., the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Elizabeth Clarke Manning, his wife. The earliest Hawthorne (or Hathorne, as the name was spelled until the novelist changed it) in
America was Maj. William Hathorne [q.v.], who came to Massachusetts in 1630 and settled first at Dorchester and then at Salem. His
son, John Hathorne, served as judge in the Salem witchcraft trials; the curse pronounced upon him by one of his victims was
remembered by his descendants and was blamed for any evil fortune which befell the house. The third Hathorne of the line was a
farmer; the fourth, the "bold Hathorne" of the Revolutionary sea ballad; the fifth, likewise a ship captain, who died four years after the
birth of his son, the future novelist. Elizabeth Clarke Manning was descended from ancestors who settled in Salem in 1679. The
younger Nathaniel was the first Hawthorne to choose a sedentary calling, a choice which he made the more easily because the will to
action had by this time faded out of the stock, to be succeeded by a mild pride of blood and a quiet loyalty to the concerns of the
mind.

The death of his father in 1808 plunged his mother into a perpetual widowhood, which she observed by keeping her own room so far
as possible and never taking her meals at the common table of the household. Naturally the son grew up in what he later called the
"cursed habits" of solitude. These seem not, however, to have made themselves felt during his pre-adolescent years, even during the
years between nine and twelve when a slight lameness shut him off from sports and turned him to a course of reading in books as
romantic as The Faerie Queene and as realistic as The Newgate Calendar and made him by fourteen acquainted with Shakespeare,
Milton, Bunyan, Clarendon, Froissart, Rousseau, and novels and romances of all sorts. At fourteen, however, about the age when, if
the father had lived, the boy would presumably have gone to sea and have begun to study the world, he went instead to Raymond,
Me., where his maternal uncles owned a tract of land on Sebago Lake in the midst of the wilderness. There the youth had his
imagination touched by the forest, which was for him a school in which the principal instruction was in contented loneliness. It is true
that after a year in Maine he went back to his studies in or near Salem, and that from 1821 to 1825 he was at Bowdoin College,
where he gambled a little, drank rather more, and skylarked a good deal in a robust, athletic, innocent way, but after taking his degree
he felt no impulse to enter a profession or to venture abroad into the expanding America of his age, and so settled down in Salem to
a dozen years devoted to making himself a man of letters. After some early exercises in deliberate gloom he arrived at a levelness of
temper which marked both his life and his work. In the end he did not regret his long retreat. "If I had sooner made my escape into the
world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude
encounters with the multitude. . . . But living in solitude till the fullness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth with the
freshness of my heart" (Passages from the American Note-Books, p. 219). In spite of what may be suspected from this argument,
Hawthorne was neither particularly priggish nor excessively shy. He was only trusting to his imagination. "I used to think I could
imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of heart and mind" (Ibid.). Indeed, until he reached his maturity at about thirty-three,
Hawthorne's imagination does seem to have been competent to sustain and interest him.

At the same time, he did not confine his imagination to an exclusive diet of itself. At least once a year, ordinarily in the summer, he
was likely to shake off his solitude, leave Salem and his mother's house behind, and strike out on a kind of wary vagabondage
through other districts of New England. His American Note-Books show him to have used his eyes and ears on his travels, as do
several of his tales and sketches. The White Mountains furnished the scene for "The Ambitious Guest," "The Great Carbuncle," and
"The Great Stone Face"; some crossroads north of Boston, for "The Seven Vagabonds"; Martha's Vineyard, for "Chippings with a
Chisel"; the Shaker community at Canterbury, N. H., which he visited in 1831, for "The Canterbury Pilgrims" and, with changes, "The
Shaker Bridal"; Greylock in the Berkshires, for "Ethan Brand." If the "Sketches from Memory," "Old Ticonderoga," and "My Visit to
Niagara" are as autobiographical as they look, Hawthorne visited Lake Champlain, followed the Erie Canal between Utica and
Syracuse, stopped at Rochester, saw Niagara Falls, and may even have gone as far as to Detroit. Everywhere he was attentive to
the manners and customs that he found. Merely as historian he has genuine value. In especial he had a decided taste for low life, for
tollgatherers, pedlars, cattledrovers, hawkers of amusement, stageagents, tavernhaunters. He must himself have experienced the
longing of the narrator in "The Seven Vagabonds" to join a crew of chance-met nomads and live by telling stories to random
audiences along the road.

Such longings, however sincere for this or that brief moment, did not move Hawthorne to become the picaresque romancer which
New England has never had. In a community of scholars, he read more than he tramped, ruffling the history of his native section in
search of color and variety. "The knowledge communicated by the historian and biographer," he wrote in one of the earliest pieces of
prose known to be his, "is analogous to that which we acquire of a country by the map--minute, perhaps, and accurate, . . . but cold
and naked" (Tales, Sketches, and Other Papers, 1883 edition, p. 227). He aimed to enliven and warm the record by reconstructing
typical "moments of drama, little episodes of controversy, clashes between the parties and ideas which divided the old New England."
In "The Gentle Boy," the first of his stories to attract attention, he went back to the Quaker persecutions; in "Young Goodman Brown,"
to the witchcraft mania; in "The Gray Champion," to the last days of Governor Andros; in "The Maypole of Merry Mount" and "Endicott
and the Red Cross," to the early days of the settlement; in the "Legends of the Province House," to the Revolution. In these, and in
others of slighter value, Hawthorne tended always to look for the conflict rather of ideas than of parties. "The future complexion of
New England," he wrote concerning the struggle between the Puritans and the jolly rioters of Merry Mount, "was involved in this
important quarrel. Should the grizzly saints establish their jurisdiction over the gay sinners, then would their spirits darken all the clime
and make it a land of clouded visages, of hard toil, of sermon and psalm forever. But should the banner of Merry Mount be fortunate,
sunshine would break upon the hills, and flowers would beautify the forest, and late posterity do homage to the Maypole." Himself a
descendant of the Puritans, Hawthorne nevertheless sympathized, lightly ironical as his language might now and then be, with the
other side, with the humane and expansive rebels against the order of austerity and orthodoxy.

That this was less a historical than a moral position on his part is indicated by the theme which occupied him most in the short stories.
He was solitary by habit, but he deeply feared the solitude which comes from egotism, the proud, hard isolation which shuts the
essential egotist away from society. In "Wakefield," telling the story of a man who had left his family to live twenty years in secret in
the next street, Hawthorne closely studied the motives which might have accounted for such an experiment of selfishness and vanity.
"The Minister's Black Veil" represented what might follow if even a virtuous egotist should hide his face in fact as others do in effect.
"Rappaccini's Daughter" took up the ancient legend of a girl so long fed on poisons that no poison could hurt her, and found behind it
the tragedy of an involuntary egotist so far removed from nature as to have become herself a poison. "Ethan Brand" revived a later
legendary idea, that of the unpardonable sin, and showed a Calvinist who believed he had committed it, and who grew, as he
brooded, into a conviction that he was a sinner without equal, and finally reached a state of pride, of egotistic desperation, which as
Hawthorne saw it was less pardonable than any other sin the man might have committed. Solitude, these early stories sought to
illustrate, leads to egotism; egotism leads to pride; and pride, by different roads, leads always away from nature. "The Birthmark"
showed a husband so crazed by a lust for perfection that he employed dark sciences to remove a birthmark from the cheek of his
otherwise flawless wife and thereby caused her death. "The Christmas Banquet" showed the punishment of pride to be an incurable
inner sense of coldness and emptiness, "a feeling," the victim says, "as if what should be my heart were a thing of vapor--a haunting
perception of unreality. . . . All things, all persons . . . have been like shadows flickering on the wall." There can be no question that
Hawthorne was, as it is traditional to say, concerned from the first with sin, but neither can there be any question that he was
concerned with the sin least likely to be involved with meanness and brutality, the sin which of all the deadly sins is perhaps closest to
a virtue.

Aside from the stories which he wrote there are virtually no events to mark the progress of his life from 1825 to 1837. Early in that
period, though the exact date is not known, he tried to find a publisher for a book which he meant to call "Seven Tales of My Native
Land." Exasperated by his failure with established publishers, and by the delays of the Salem printer who said he would take the
chance, the author destroyed the manuscript. In 1828 he issued, at his own expense and anonymously, the undistinguished
Fanshawe, of which the scene was more or less Bowdoin and the hero more or less Hawthorne. The novel, though it got him no
readers, got him a publisher, the energetic Samuel Griswold Goodrich [q.v.] of Boston, who was just then founding an annual, the
Token. During the fourteen years of its persistence the Token, with the New England Magazine, to the editors of which Goodrich
introduced him, was to be Hawthorne's chief outlet. Not till 1832, however, did anything from the lonely venturer at Salem rise much
above the elegant melancholy which characterized this and similar annuals, and even "The Gentle Boy," in that year, did not rise too
far above it. This tale was quickly followed, however, by enough short masterpieces to justify the publication in 1837 of the first series
of Twice-Told Tales, with which, though the book was calmly received, the dozen years of solitary experiment came to an end, as did
also the earlier plans for a book to be called "Provincial Tales" and another to be called "The Story-Teller." For another dozen years
or so, which saw a second series of Twice-Told Tales (1842), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), and The Snow-Image and Other
Twice-Told Tales (1851), Hawthorne continued to write short stories, but he had an increasing reputation, and he lived approximately
in the visible world.

During 1836 he had already acted as editor for seven months of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge,
published by Goodrich in Boston, where Hawthorne not only edited but also wrote or compiled the whole of every issue. After this he
compiled Peter Parley's Universal History (1837), a piece of hackwork which is said to have sold over a million copies before it went
out of print. As Oliver Goldsmith had done before him, Hawthorne put his smooth, clear prose into routine service for young readers,
whom later he served by writing Grandfather's Chair (1841), Famous Old People (1841), Liberty Tree (1841), Biographical Stories for
Children (1842), and, finally, the books in which his serviceable pen became silver, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852) and
Tanglewood Tales for Girls and Boys (1853), two of the lasting triumphs of their mode. All these undertakings were, of course, for the
sake of money, the want of which did as much as anything else to break up Hawthorne's career of solitude. With the help of his friend
Franklin Pierce [q.v.], the emerging recluse tried in 1837 for the post of historian to an expedition to the Antarctic then being planned,
and, failing that, became weigher and gager in the Boston Custom House from 1839 to 1841. Having resigned his place, which he
knew he would probably lose when the Whigs came again into office, he went to live at West Roxbury, with the Transcendental
enthusiasts who had founded Brook Farm. Hawthorne invested his savings in the little Utopia, but he was otherwise not an
enthusiast, and he left after an intermittent year of residence had proved to him that the association did not suit his temper or solve
his problem.

Neither the Custom House nor Brook Farm had enabled him to enter the world enough to get his living from it and yet to keep his
imagination free in the security thus obtained. In both he had been disappointed by the realities to which he had looked forward with
the hope that they might give the needed stir and substance to his life. Temporarily abandoning any such hope, he was married July
9, 1842, to Sophia Amelia Peabody of Salem, his love for whom during the past four years had steadily increased his dissatisfaction
with solitude. "Indeed," he had written to her, "we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real
about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,--then we begin to be,--thereby we
are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity" (Passages from the American Note-Books, p. 219). In the Old Manse at Concord,
where Hawthorne made his home for the next three years, he discovered in love, of which he seems to have had no previous
experience, a reality which he had not discovered in "encounters with the multitude." Profoundly happy with his wife, he was not, for
sometime, too much disturbed by his serious lack of money or by his unproductiveness as a writer. Nor was he distracted by the
presence near him of the most distinguished group of men who have ever come together in a single American village. He was merely
bored by Bronson Alcott, and was chiefly tolerant towards Ellery Channing. He listened to Emerson with interest but without the
customary reverence and without catching the infection of abstract thought. Only with Thoreau did Hawthorne arrive at anything like
intimacy, and that was based upon the habits of silence which they had in about an equal degree, and upon a taste for things, as
distinguished from opinions, in which Thoreau had gone further than Hawthorne but in which Hawthorne was eager to follow him.
Though the effects of so much happiness were not immediately visible, these three years were in the long run the most fruitful, or at
least the most stabilizing, of all that Hawthorne ever lived through.

The Concord idyll, however, was broken up by the pressure of necessity. Hawthorne removed his wife and child to Salem in 1845,
tried to become postmaster, and instead was appointed surveyor of the port. Before taking up the duties of his office he brought
together what he believed was to be his final collection of short stories, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), and wrote for it an
introductory paper exquisitely describing the circumstances of his pastoral interlude. By comparison his next three years, about which
he was later to write in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, were an interlude of comedy. The custom house at Salem depressed
and troubled him as much as that at Boston had done, but he now stood on surer ground and could smile at what would once have
made him fret. Nevertheless, he resented his dismissal when the Democrats went out of power in 1849, and he thereafter held a
grudge against his native town. He had written little during the period, though to it belong "The Great Stone Face" and "Ethan Brand,"
and had finally lost interest in short stories, but when, once more forced into private life, he resumed his proper occupation, he found,
or at least showed, how much he had stored up during his two interludes. The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables
(1851), and The Blithedale Romance (1852), which brought his art to its somewhat tardy peak, poured from him in a serene flood.

The novels marked no decided break with the tales. In style, tone, tempo, themes, Hawthorne proceeded much as he had always
done. Only his dimensions were different. The Scarlet Letter, for which a hint had already appeared in "Endicott and the Red Cross,"
is really a succession of moments of drama from the lives of the principal characters, almost without the links of narrative which
ordinarily distinguish a novel from a play. What binds the parts together is the continuity of the mood, the large firmness of the central
idea. Both mood and idea lift the story to a region more spacious than seventeenth-century Salem might have been expected to
furnish. This novel again portrays a clash between elements opposed in old New England, but, at the same time, the universal clash
between egotism and nature. Dimmesdale is destroyed by the egotism which leads him to keep the secret of his offense, even
though another must bear the whole punishment. Chillingworth is destroyed by the egotism which leads him to assume the divine
responsibility of vengeance. Hester, whose nature no less than her fate makes it impossible for her to be a stealthy egotist, is the only
one of the three who survives the tragedy and grows with her experience. If The Scarlet Letter was an extended study of such
egotism as Hawthorne had dealt with in many of his tales, The House of the Seven Gables was an extended description of such
houses and households as he had dealt with in many of his sketches. This house was described from an actual house in Salem, and
this household was in some respects like the household of Hawthorne's own youth--withdrawn, solitary, declining, haunted by an
ancestral curse. Into the story he distilled all the representative qualities, all the typical memories of decadent New England, without,
however, bringing in that New England complacency which made a virtue out of decay and refused to admit the existence of any evil
in adversity. The Pyncheons inevitably dwindle to ashes, and the life of their proud line has to be carried on, collaterally, by nature, by
the infusion of less genteel blood. With The House of the Seven Gables Hawthorne said farewell to the Salem in which he had grown
up. In The Blithedale Romance he turned to the contemporary world. His setting was more or less what he remembered from Brook
Farm, which he used in order "to establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his
brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives."
This was as near as he cared to come to "certainly the most romantic episode of his own life--essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact,
" as Hawthorne characterized Brook Farm in his preface. By a kind of softness in the tone, by a kind of charming formalism in the
characterization and dialogue, he dimmed the lights and suffused the colors of his drama. Yet he no less firmly indicated his guiding
thesis, which was that philanthropy, of the sort displayed by Hollingsworth, is at bottom only another egotism and may bring the
philanthropist into tragic conflict with nature.

The Scarlet Letter was written and published, with great success, while Hawthorne was still living in Salem, after he had lost his place
in the custom house. The second novel he wrote at Lenox in the Berkshires, to which he had gone with his family in 1850 and where
he lived in a farm house during a cold winter and two agreeable summers. Though again in retirement, he saw a good many friends,
and in particular made the acquaintance of Herman Melville [q.v.], who was then writing Moby Dick at Pittsfield. How relatively
contented Hawthorne was in his solitude, how steady in his skepticism, is made clear by the contrast between him and this bitter,
violent man of genius. In 1851 the household was again moved, to West Newton, where the third novel was completed the next
spring. The novels brought Hawthorne money as well as an increase of reputation. He bought a house in Concord and returned to the
scene of his greatest happiness. Once more, however, there were interruptions, even less congenial to the novelist than those which,
at Lenox, had seen him taking advantage of his new fame by collecting The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales and writing A
Wonder-Book. Pierce, nominated for president by the Democrats, asked his old friend to prepare a campaign biography. Hawthorne
was totally uninterested in politics, but he had hitherto benefited by political appointments, and he had a strong sense of obligation to
the man who had most aided him. He consequently wrote, with great labor, The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852), and, after some
hesitation on his part, was rewarded by another appointment, this time that of United States consul at Liverpool. In 1853, at the age
of nearly fifty, Hawthorne for the first time left the New World for the Old, where he was to remain for seven years.

The seven years came too late to work any important changes in either his art or his thought. In his native province he had inclined
toward the universal; in a larger universe he inclined toward the provincial. During the whole of his stay in England, from 1853 to
1858, he made friends with no men or women of first-rate quality, very few of whom he even saw. Instead he faithfully, if now and
then complainingly, discharged his consular duties, visited historical scenes in the spirit of the conscious tourist, and waited two years
before he went for the first time to London. London, however, delighted him. In Italy, where Hawthorne lived during 1858 and the first
months of 1859, he felt most at home among the American and British residents and travelers. Though he believed he was not
homesick, he felt overpowered by Europe, by the rush of countless new impressions. With the eagerness of a very young American
he tasted the pleasures of antiquity in the expected places. With the patience of a man long withheld from the masterpieces of
architecture, music, painting, sculpture, he gorged cathedrals and galleries. Often he was bored. At the end of his journey he could
still seriously condemn the representation of the nude in works of art. But his provincialism, because it remained honest, did not
become disagreeable. What small men may learn earlier Hawthorne was learning late, and he gave himself to the task with a temper
which was observant, sensitive, and resolute. When, after another year in England, he came back to Concord in 1860, he remained a
provincial, but he also regretted the world he had left behind.

Hawthorne's stay abroad had not stimulated his pen. After Tanglewood Tales, written before he left Concord, he did not publish
another book before The Marble Faun (1860), begun in Italy and completed in England. It, with Our Old Home (1863), a beautiful,
shrewd, slyly satirical commentary upon England, summed up what he had acquired in Europe. He was enough a son of New
England to feel an obligation to describe Rome in his romance with something of the thoroughness of a guidebook, though of a
guidebook remarkably suave and melodious. He was also enough of a son of his province to show, in his central idea, that he had
been frightened by paganism and driven back to Calvinism. Miriam and Donatello are both creatures of nature, of a sort to which
Hawthorne had given his sympathy in the earlier tales and novels; but these two, surprised into the crime of murder, see it as a sin
even more than as a crime, and are driven by conscience along a path which a Puritan might have traveled. Their sense of sin is their
teacher, and from it they receive their moral education. Indeed, Donatello, who is pure nature, becomes truly human only after sin has
touched him. The conclusion seems a long way from the position which Hawthorne had taken in his drama of Merry Mount.

The four years after his return saw, except for Our Old Home, nothing further by him. He was constantly tempted by another theme
for a romance, or rather, by two: the idea of an elixir of life and that of the return to England of an American heir to some hereditary
estate. Yet though Hawthorne experimented with them in four fragments, The Ancestral Footstep, Septimius Felton, Dr. Grimshaw's
Secret, and The Dolliver Romance, all published posthumously, he could not fuse or complete them. The Civil War fatally interrupted
his reflections. Moreover, his imagination was dissolving, his vitality was breaking up, along with the New England era of which he
had been, among its poets and romancers, the consummate flower. He could not survive his age. He could not even endure the
tumult of its passing. In 1862 he visited Washington, called upon Lincoln with a delegation from Massachusetts, and wrote a
magazine article called "Chiefly About War Matters" which vexed many readers of the Atlantic (July 1862) who could not understand
the novelist's unconcern with the specific issues of the conflict. The death of Thoreau in 1862 weighed upon Hawthorne, as did the
illness of his daughter Una. He wrote Our Old Home with difficulty and could not bring himself to undertake a serial for the Atlantic. In
May 1864 he set out from Concord somewhat as he had been accustomed to do in his years at Salem, except that now, too feeble to
go alone, he was accompanied by his friend Pierce, and went by carriage. In Plymouth, N. H., Hawthorne died quietly in his sleep. He
was mourned as a classic figure and has ever since been so regarded.

FURTHER READINGS
[Hawthorne himself furnishes a good deal of valuable biographical material in the Passages from the Am. Notebooks (1868),
Passages from the English Notebooks (1870), and Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks (1871), edited from his journal
by his wife. The published notebooks do not always represent the original manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library with complete
fidelity. His wife in Notes in England and Italy (1869), his son Julian Hawthorne in Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884) and in
Hawthorne and His Circle (1903), his daughter Rose Hawthorne Lathrop in Memories of Hawthorne (1897), and his son-in-law
George Parsons Lathrop in A Study of Hawthorne (1876) all have the special authority which comes from their relationship. In
addition there have been numerous biographical and critical studies by other writers, among whom may be mentioned: Newton Arvin,
Hawthorne (1929); Horatio Bridge, Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1893), Moncure Daniel Conway, Life of Nathaniel
Hawthorne (1890), L. Dhaleine, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Sa Vie et Son Oeuvre (1905), Herbert Gorman, Hawthorne: a Study in Solitude
(1927), Henry James, Hawthorne (1879), Lloyd Morris, The Rebellious Puritan: Portrait of Mr. Hawthorne (1927), F. P. Stearns, The
Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1906), Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (1913), George Edward Woodberry,
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1902). There is a careful bibliography of the writings by and about Hawthorne in The Cambridge Hist. of Am.
Lit., II (1918), 415-24.]

Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)

"Nathaniel Hawthorne." Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936. Gale In Context: U.S. History,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/BT2310011646/UHIC?u=lap10cps&sid=bookmark-UHIC&xid=2a29c091. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.
Gale Document Number: GALE|BT2310011646