FREE ESSAY ON NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Justin B.
Mrs. Wilkinson
English Honors III
02/24/00
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The 19th century had many great achievements happen within its 100-year time period. From
the building of the Erie Canal, to the steel plow being invented. From the invention of
the telegraph, to Thomas Edison creating the first light bulb. While all of these
inventions have stood the test of time, one has lasted just as long; the inspiring tales
a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. His name by birth was
Nathaniel Hawthorne. He added the w to his name when he began to sign his stories.
("Nathaniel Hawthorne" American Writers II) One of Hawthorne's ancestors was actually a
judge in the Salem witch trials. The guilt and shame Hawthorne felt of his ancestors were
included in some of his stories. (McGraw Hill, pg.67)
Hawthorne's father was a sea captain. He died of fever when Hawthorne was only four.
Shortly after his father's death, his mother was forced to move her three children into
her parent's home and then into her brother's home in Maine. Hawthorne's childhood was
not particularly abnormal, as many famous authors have claimed to have.
Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College and graduated after four years. After graduation, he
returned to Salem. Contrary to his family's expectations, Hawthorne did not begin to read
law or enter business, rather he moved into his mother's house to turn himself into a
writer. Hawthorne wrote his mother, "I do not want to be a doctor and live by men's
diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels.
So, I don't see that there is anything left for me but to be an author." (" American
Writers II, pg. 227)
For the next twelve years Hawthorne lived in his mother's house. He Seldemly went out
except late at night, or when going to another city. " I had read endlessly all sorts of
good and good for nothing books, and in dearth of other employment, had early begun to
scribble sketches and stories, most of which I burned." Reflected Hawthorne. (McGraw
Hill, pg.68)
Hawthorne's first novel, Fanshawe, was published anonymously in 1828 at his own expense.
Because of a lack of sales, Hawthorne recalled every copy he could find of the book and
destroyed them. When a local printer delayed publishing his Seven Tales of My Native
Land, Hawthorne withdrew the manuscript and burned it " in a mood half-savage,
half-despairing." Other stories he had destroyed before publication because he thought
they were " morbid." (The Vanguard Press, pg.34)
Hawthorne traveled to many different places for brief amounts of times. He traveled to
New Haven, to Swampscott, and to the mountains of Vermont. Hawthorne kept a notebook with
him every place he went in which he jotted observations of places and people, ideas for
stories, and phrases, which pleased him. He sold tales and sketches to New England
magazines. He was even persuaded to edit a Boston magazine for six months. (American
writers II, pg.230)
In 1837, at the age of thirty-two, Hawthorne published his first collection, Twice-Told
Tales, Longfellow, the most popular poet of the day, gave it a flattering review. New
York magazine editors read it and offered him jobs with them.
Within two years Hawthorne would be married to his wife Sophia. Hawthorne soon realized
that supporting a wife was not as easy as he anticipated it to be. He could never manage
it by writing stories, so he decided to leave Salem and his mother's house for a
political appointment as measurer of coal and salt in the Boston customhouse. The
contrast between his old ways and this new way of life was a shock for Hawthorne. He had
hoped to discover what "reality" was like as well as earn a respectable salary, and he
gave it a try. After two years, however, he resigned from this " very grievous
thralldom." He had been able to write little more than notebook entries and he found "
nothing in the world that he thought preferable to his old solitude." (The Vanguard
Press, pg.56)
The Hawthorne's next moved to concord, Massachusetts. The Hawthorne's found a happiness
neither expected out of life, " Everybody that comes here," he wrote in 1843," falls
asleep; but for my own part, I feel as if, for the first time in my life, I was awake. I
have found a reality, Though it looks very much like some of my old dreams." (McGraw
Hill, pg. 69)
Hawthorne produced more than twenty tales during three years in concord, sold them to
magazines, and then collected them in Mosses from an Old Manse. His reputation was
growing. Edgar Allen Poe called Hawthorne, " the example, par excellence, in this
country, of the privately admired and publicly unappreciated man of genius." (McGraw
Hill, pg.69)
It took Hawthorne a return to Salem to bring him fame. A Bowdoin classmate, Franklin
Pierce, Found him a job as a surveyor in the Salem customhouse. After three years of
dealing with the dullness of the work, he was fired for political reasons. His wife
comforted him by saying, " now you can write your book." (American Writers II, pg 242) In
seven months it was finished. In April 1850, Ticknor and Fields of Boston published The
Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne called The Scarlet Letter, " positively a hell-fired story, into which I found
it almost impossible to throw any cheering light." Some contemporary critics called it "
America's first tragedy." It was no doubt Hawthorne's most widely known story he ever
wrote.
The last fourteen years of Hawthorne's life were very different from the struggle to be
recognized that his entire life had been about. Within a year Hawthorne finished and
published another novel named The House of Seven Gables; a story about a Pyncheon family
of Salem and Maule's curse. A year later he published The Blithedale Romance, a satire of
Brook Farm. After seven years in Europe, he tried an even more ambitious novel, The
Marble Faun. Sadly, none of these novels reached the acclaim that The Scarlet Letter had
with critics. (Grolier Electronic Publishing, 1992)