Dissatisfied with this novel, Hawthorne attempted to buy up all the copies so that no one could read it. He did not publish another novel for almost 25 years. By , he had written two-thirds of the short stories he was to write in his lifetime. None of these stories gained him much attention, and he could not interest a publisher in printing a collection of his tales until , when his college friend Horatio Bridge backed the publishing of Twice-Told Tales, a collection of Hawthorne's stories that had been published separately in magazines.
His schoolmate and friend, Longfellow, reviewed the book with glowing terms. Edgar Allan Poe, known for his excoriating reviews of writers, not only wrote warmly of Hawthorne's book but also took the opportunity to define the short story in his now famous review.
Twice-Told Tales is considered a masterpiece of literature, and it contains unmistakably American stories. In , Hawthorne met Sophia Amelia Peabody, and the following year they were engaged. It was at this time that Hawthorne invested a thousand dollars of his meager capital in the Brook Farm Community at West Roxbury. These transcendentalist thinkers influenced much of Hawthorne's thinking about the importance of intuition rather than intellect in uncovering the truths of nature and human beings.
Hawthorne left this experiment in November , disillusioned with the viewpoint of the community, exhausted from the work, and without financial hope that he could support a wife.
From this experience, however, he gained the setting for a later novel, The Blithedale Romance. In a trip to Boston after leaving Brook Farm, Hawthorne reached an understanding about a salary for future contributions to the Democratic Review. He and Sophia married in Boston on July 9, , and left for Concord, Massachusetts, where they took up residence in the now-famous "Old Manse.
Hawthorne's life at the "Old Manse" was happy and productive, and these were some of the happiest years of his life. He was newly married, in love with his wife, and surrounded by many of the leading literary figures of the day: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. During this time, Hawthorne wrote for the Democratic Review and produced some tales that would be published in in Mosses from an Old Manse.
Financial problems continued to plague the family, however. The birth of their first child, Una, caused Hawthorne to once again seek a financially secure job. With the help of his old friends, Hawthorne was appointed a surveyor for the port of Salem. His son, Julian, was born in Although the new job eased the financial problems for the family, Hawthorne again found little time to pursue his writing.
Nevertheless, during this time, he was already forming ideas for a novel based on his Puritan ancestry and introduced by a preface about the Custom House where he worked.
When the Whigs won the election, Hawthorne lost his position. And I will share that with you. But be warned; he is not a cheap date! You will have to work hard before you can truly love this writer. The price of admission is that one must read and study over the introductory chapter to The Scarlet Letter , The Custom-House. As much as it will not feel like it at the time, if you are a high school student, and your English teacher has asked you to specifically read The Custom-House , it's because he or she loves you and cares about your education which as Twain famously pointed out, should not be confused with your schooling.
You will know that you truly understand those two introductory chapters when you realize the Nathaniel Hawthorne was a mids Bad Ass who explicitly, purposely, and repeatedly "stuck it to the man", even after, heck especially after they asked him to stop! I also do not think you can properly understand The Scarlet Letter without understanding The Custom-House and also marking the sins of Hawthorne's forefathers.
I assure you, the effort is worth the reward. He was educated at one of my favorite small universities, Bowdoin College , where he was a student from Henry H. Nathaniel Hawthorne Nathaniel Hawthorne , born on July 4, in Salem, Massachusetts was an American short story writer and romance novelist who experimented with a broad range of styles and genres. Here is Hawthorne describing them both starting with the great-great-great grandfather : He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanical traits, both good and evil.
He was likewise a bitter persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were many.
His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him.
So deep a stain, indeed, that his dry old bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust! Higginbotham's Catastrophe Mrs. It was slightly old-fashioned even when he wrote it.
It is very deliberate, with measured rhythms, marked by formal decorum. It often prefers the abstract or generalized to the concrete or specific word. Since most of his stories consisted of moral, cautionary tales about guilt, sin and retribution, many readers consider his work to be dark and sometimes gloomy.
Hawthorne continued to write more novels throughout the s until he was appointed to the consulship in Liverpool, England by his old college friend President Franklin Pierce. While in Europe he wrote The Marble Faun, based on his sight-seeing experiences in Italy, and Our Old Home before moving back to his house in Concord in the early s. Hawthorne suffered from poor health in the s and died in his sleep during a trip to the White Mountains with Franklin Pierce on May 19, He is buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.
Sources: Waggoner, Hyatt H. Nathaniel Hawthorne American. University of Minnesota Press, Moore, Margaret B. The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne. University of Missouri Press, Hi Mason, thanks for your comment.
What was the question you had? Just happened on this page by accident and wanted to say it was well written and interesting. Nathaniel Hawthorne is my cousin as my maternal tree includes the Ingersolls of Maine that are traced down to Suzannah Ingersoll who lived in the House of the Seven Gables with her father. I really learned a lot about Hawthorne from this page but I have a question that why did he write so many stories about sin and guilt?
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