Nathaniel Hawthorne1804-1864

Childhood

Born July 4,1804, in Salem, Massachusetts.

Parents were devout Puritans. Mother gave birth alone

while father was out at sea. Father died when Hawthorne

was four years old.

Childhood

Sent to private school once his relatives discovered his storytelling abilities.

Had aspirations to be a writer at an early

age. Sent to Bowdoin College

in Maine.

Family History His great-great-

grandfather, William Hathorne, ordered the whipping of Anne Coleman and four others in the streets of Salem.

His great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was the magistrate (judge) presiding over the trial of the accused witches of Salem (1692).

College in Maine

Classmates included Franklin Pierce and Henry Longfellow

Pierce future President of the USA

Longfellow poet, educator, linguist

Graduated in 1825

Pierce

Longfellow

Reclusive Years in Salem

He first anonymously published short stories and a novel, Fanshawe.

Hawthorne later formally withdrew most of this early work, discounting it as the work of inexperienced youth.

He burned most of his works from these years.

Back into Society

Editor for The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining

Knowledge in 1836 Appointed to the Boston

Custom House in 1839

Became engaged to Sophia Peabody, married in 1842

Concord After his marriage to Sophia,

moved to the Old Manse in Concord.

Joined the writing circles of Thoreau, Emerson, and Louisa May Alcott.

The Transcendentalists believed that human existence transcended the sensory realm, and rejected formalism in favor of individual

intuition and imagination.

Governmental Offices Between1846 and

1849, he served as a surveyor of the Salem Custom House.

He was ousted from that job in 1849, when the incoming political party, The Whigs, fired him to put in their own political appointees.

Governmental Duties

Hawthorne wrote a biography for Presidential

candidate Pierce for his campaign.

President Pierce then appointed Hawthorne to serve as the US Consul to Liverpool, England.

Influences on Hawthorne’s Works

His early childhood in Salem and work in the Salem

Custom House. His Puritan family background. He believed in the existence of

the devil. He believed in determinism, a

theory of predestination.

Works

Fanshawe (1828) Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) The Scarlet Letter (1850) The House of Seven Gables (1851) The Snow-Image (1851) The Blithedale Romance (1852) Life of Franklin Pierce (1852) The Marble Faun (1860)

Final Days Returned to the US from

Europe in 1860. Became ill and underwent

a loss of literary creativity.

Journeyed to the White Mountains hoping

to restore his health.

Died in Plymouth, NH on May 19, 1864.

Buried in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord.