Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Early career

Fanshawe: A Tale, Hawthorne's first published work, was based on his experiences at Bowdoin College and was published anonymously in October 1828 at the author's expense of $100. Despite generally positive feedback, it did not do well. In the Salem Gazette, he had published several minor works.

Hawthorne, the editor of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, in 1836, served as the editor. He was on boarded with poet Thomas Green Fessenden on Hancock Street in Boston's Beacon Hill at the time. He was offered a year as a weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House, but he accepted on January 17, 1839. During his stay in Istanbul, he rented a room from George Stillman Hillard, Charles Sumner's business partner. In the relative anonymity of what he referred to as his "owl's nest" in the family's house, Hawthorne wrote. "I haven't lived, but only dreamed about living," he said as he reflected on this period of his life. He contributed short stories to many magazines and annuals, including "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil," among others, although no one paid much attention to him. In the spring of 1837, Horatio Bridge offered to cover the possibility of collecting these stories in the form Twice-Told Tales, which made Hawthorne famous locally.

When Hawthorne and his buddy Jonathan Cilley begged that Cilley would marry before Hawthorne did, it was worth it. He had won the bet by 1836, but he did not have to remain a bachelor for life. He had public flirtations with Mary Silsbee and Elizabeth Peabody, then he began pursuing Peabody's sister, illustrator and transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. He attended Brook Farm in 1841, not because he accepted the experiment, but because it helped him save money to marry Sophia. He paid a $1,000 deposit and was put in charge of shoveling the hill of manure referred to as "the Gold Mine." He left earlier this year, but his Brook Farm experience inspired his book The Blithedale Romance. On July 9, 1842, Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody in the Peabody parlor on West Street in Boston. The two couples then moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where they spent three years. Ralph Waldo Emerson, his neighbor, welcomed him into his social circle, but Hawthorne remained largely apathetic and remained largely mute at gatherings. Hawthorne wrote the bulk of the stories in Mosses from an Old Manse, according to him.

Sophia, like Hawthorne, was a reclusive person. She had frequent migraines throughout her childhood and underwent numerous experimental medical therapies. She was mostly bedridden until her sister took her to Hawthorne, after which her headaches seemed to have diminished. The Hawthorns had a long and happy marriage. He referred to her as his "Dove" and wrote that she "is, in the strictest sense, my sole companion; and I need no more than in my heart." "I thank God for her boundless heart." Sophia adored her husband's work.

She wrote in one of her journals:

On the first anniversary of the Hawthornes' marriage, Poet Ellery Channing arrived at the Old Manse for support. Martha Hunt, a local teen, drowned herself in the river, and Hawthorne's boat Pond Lily was required to locate her body. Hawthorne aided in the recovery of the body, which he described as "a spectacle of such perfect terror"... She was the "very image of death-agony." The incident inspired a scene in his book The Blithedale Romance.

Three children were born in the Hawthornes. Their first child, Una, was born March 3, 1844; her name was a nod to The Faerie Queene, which led to family members' displeasure. "I find it a sober and serious kind of joy that comes from the birth of a child," Hawthorne wrote to a friend. There is no such thing as an escape. I now have a business on earth, and I have to wonder what the right way is done." The Hawthorns immigrated to Salem in October 1845. Julian was born in 1846. On June 22, 1846, Hawthorne wrote to his sister Louisa, "A tiny troglodyte made his appearance here at ten minutes to six o'clock this morning, who proclaimed to be your nephew." Rose was born in May 1851 and Hawthorne named her her his "autumnal flower."

Hawthorne was officially appointed Surveyor for the District of Salem and Beverly, as well as Inspector of the Revenue for the Port of Salem, earning $100,000 per year. He had a rough time writing during this time, as he told Longfellow: he had trouble writing during this period.

This position, as well as his earlier appointment to the Boston custom house, was vulnerable to the spoils system's politics. After the 1848 presidential election, Hawthorne, a Democrat, and lost his position in Washington due to the change of government. He wrote a letter of protest to the Boston Daily Advertiser, which was attacked by the Whigs and Democrats, bolstering Hawthorne's dismissal as a long-awaited event in New England. The death of his mother in late July was deeply affecting, with many identifying it as the "most painful hour I ever lived." In 1848, he was appointed the Salem Lyceum's corresponding secretary. Emerson, Thoreau, Louis Agassiz, and Theodore Parker were among the guests who attended the season's lectures.

In mid-March 1850, Hawthorne returned to writing and published The Scarlet Letter, which includes a preface that refers to his three-year tenure in the Custom House and several allusions to local politicians, who did not value their treatment. It was one of America's first mass-produced books, selling 2,500 copies in ten days and earning Hawthorne $1,500 over 14 years. The book was pirated by book dealers in London and became a best-seller in the United States, beginning his most lucrative period as a writer. Edwin Percy Whipple, Hawthorne's friend, protested the novel's "morbid intensity" and its intricate psychological information, arguing that the book "is therefore apt to become "anatomical in his exhibition of them," according to twentieth-century writer D. H. Lawrence, who said that there could not be a more perfect work of the American imagination than The Scarlet Letter.

At the end of March 1850, Hawthorne and his family relocated to a tiny red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts. Beginning on August 5, 1850, he became friends with Herman Melville, who were visiting a picnic hosted by a mutual friend. Melville had just read Hawthorne's short story collection Mosses from an Old Manse, and his unsigned review of the collection was published in The Literary World on August 17 and August 24. These tales, Melville, "shrouded in darkness, ten times black," Hawthorne revealed a dark side to the tale. At the time, he was writing his book Moby-Dick and dedicating the piece in 1851 to Hawthorne: "In recognition of his genius," he wrote in 1851.

Hawthorne's time in the Berkshires was extremely fruitful. He wrote "The House of the Seven Gables (1851), which poet and critic James Russell Lowell said was more accurate than The Scarlet Letter and was "the most valuable contribution to New England history that has ever been written." He wrote The Blithedale Romance (1852), his first work to be published in the first person. In 1851, he published A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, a collection of short stories retelling myths that he hadn't been dreaming about writing since 1846. Nonetheless, poet Ellery Channing said that Hawthorne "has lived in this area for a long time." The family loved the Berkshires, but Hawthorne did not enjoy the winters in their tiny house. They arrived in 1851 on November 21, 1851. "I am sick to death of Berkshire," Hawthorne said. During much of my entire stay, I've felt languid and dispirited.

The Hawthornes returned to Concord in May 1852, where they lived until July 1853. They purchased The Hillside, a home that had previously been owned by Amos Bronson Alcott and his family's, in February and renamed it The Wayside. Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were among their neighbors in Concord. Hawthorne wrote "The Life of Franklin Pierce," his friend's campaign memoir, which portrayed him as "a man of peaceful pursuits" that year. "If Pierce makes out Pierce to be a hero or a brave man, it will be the best work of fiction he's ever wrote," Horace Mann said. Pierce is depicted in Hawthorne's biography as a statesman and soldier who had failed to achieve much success due to his inability to make "little noise" and thus "withdrew into the background." Despite rumors of his alcoholism, Pierce left out Pierce's drinking habits, and reiterated Pierce's belief that slavery could not be improved by human contrivances, but that it would eventually "vanish like a dream."

Hawthorne was rewarded in 1853 with the post of United States consul in Liverpool shortly after the publication of Tanglewood Tales, with Pierce's election as President. The position was regarded as the most lucrative foreign service position at the time, according to Hawthorne's wife, who referred to the Embassy in London as "second in dignity." During this time, he and his family lived in Rock Ferry's Rock Park estate, in one of the houses on the Wirral shore of the River Mersey. So, to attend his place of service at the United States consulate in Liverpool, Hawthorne, would have been a frequent traveler on the steamboat operated Rock Ferry to Liverpool ferry service departing from the Rock Ferry Slipway at the end of Bedford Road. His appointment came at the end of the Pierce administration in 1857. Before 1860, the Hawthorne family toured France and Italy. The previously clean-shaven Hawthorne grew a bushy mustache during his stay in Italy.

The family returned to The Wayside in 1860, and the publication of The Marble Faun, his first new book in seven years, was released in that year. Hawthorne admitted that he had aged well, referring to himself as "drinkled with time and agony."

Hawthorne and William D. Ticknor travelled to Washington, D.C., where he met Abraham Lincoln and other notable figures at the start of the American Civil War. In 1862, he wrote about his experiences in the essay "Chiefly About War Matters."

He was unable to write any more romance books due to his ill health. Hawthorne was suffering from stomach pain and continued on a recuperative trip with his buddy Franklin Pierce, but Bronson Alcott was concerned that Hawthorne was too sick to be ill. He died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire, while on a tour of the White Mountains. Pierce sent Elizabeth Peabody a letter requesting that she alert Mrs. Hawthorne in person. Mrs. Hawthorne was too befuddled by the news to handle the funeral arrangements herself. Julian, a freshman at Harvard College, learned of his father's death the next day; ironically, he was incorporated into the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity by being blindfolded and placed in a coffin on the same day. Longfellow wrote "The Bells of Lynn," a tribute poem to Hawthorne that was published in 1866. In Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts, Hawthorne was buried on what is now known as "Authors' Ridge." Longfellow, Emerson, Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James T. Fields, and Edwin Percy Whipple were among the Pallbearers. "I felt there was a tragic component in the case, but it may have been more fully rendered," Emerson wrote about the funeral. "I thought the man's terrible solitude, which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, and he died as a result of it."

Both his wife Sophia and her daughter Una were buried in England when they were born in England. However, they were arrested in plots close to Hawthorne in June 2006.

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