Who Was Nathaniel Hawthorne?
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of John Hathorne, one of the presiding magistrates at the Salem witch trials – a lineage Hawthorne carried as a persistent source of guilt he addressed directly in his writing, adding the "w" to his surname as an adult in what biographers have read as a deliberate act of distancing from his ancestor's judgment. He lived briefly at Brook Farm, the transcendentalist utopian community, and married Sophia Peabody, part of the intellectual circle surrounding Emerson and the Concord transcendentalists, though Hawthorne's own fiction consistently pushed back against the era's confident optimism about human moral progress.
The Scarlet Letter (1850) established Hawthorne's reputation and remains the fullest working-out of his central preoccupation: the concealment and disclosure of sin within a Puritan community whose public righteousness depends on private guilt remaining hidden. Hester Prynne bears her adultery publicly, marked by the letter she is sentenced to wear; the town's minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, conceals the same sin for years, and Hawthorne stages his private torment as considerably worse than Hester's public shame.
Hawthorne belongs in this archive as the writer whose fiction most directly stages the failure of a self-built covering under sustained pressure – Dimmesdale's respectability, his eloquence, his private acts of self-punishment, none of which relieve the weight of an unconfessed sin the way Hester's public exposure, however painful, eventually does. The argument essay linked below reads Dimmesdale's slow collapse against the pattern of covering the archive traces from Genesis 3:7 and 3:21.
In Their Own Words
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
– The Scarlet Letter, 1850“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred.”
– The Scarlet Letter, 1850“Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp.”
– attributedSelected Bibliography
- The Scarlet Letter – 1850
- The House of the Seven Gables – 1851
- The Blithedale Romance – 1852
- Twice-Told Tales – 1837
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