Nathaniel hawthorne nationality

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On Hawthorne’s Mind

What did Hawthorne believe? The author of our classic novel of religious conscience and religious suffering, and of works imbued throughout with religious concerns and religious language, boasted of not being a churchgoer. His baptism, if it occurred, left no trace on the records. His mother, who became a widowed recluse when Nathaniel was only four, did take the boy and his sisters to services at the East Meeting House in Salem, where the Hathornes (the “w” was added by our subject, after college) had had a pew for 170 years—“the old wooden meetinghouse,” Hawthorne was to write, “which used, on wintry Sabbaths, to be the frozen purgatory of my childhood.” At Bowdoin College, he jested of “Sunday sickness” and was frequently fined for missing chapel. From there he wrote his mother, “The being a Minister is of course out of the question. I shall not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life.”

During his adoring courtship of Sophia Peabody, he rather resolutely dec

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Tall, mysterious, and handsome, Nathaniel Hawthorne was known for walking silently by himself. He was a writer and creator who could not bear the indignities of small talk. He was lost in worlds of his own making on strolls through the New England woods. Perhaps, if you had happened upon him, you might have thought him rude. Perhaps he was.

But while those walks—friend to many a plot-stricken narrator—may not have deepened the man’s social graces, they did allow him to create scenes and characters still with us, still beguiling us with their Gothic beauty. Hester Prynne, the fallen star of The Scarlet Letter, was the first literary creation of the battle-scarred republic to achieve international recognition. Her tale of sin, tragedy, and limited redemption announced the ascendancy of American letters in the antebellum 19th century.

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Restless Heir of Puritan Worldview

It is tempting to view Hawthorne in this modern era as one whose stories—featuring such taboo topics as adultery and deception—helped divest post-Puritan New England from its spiritual conscience

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Nathaniel Hawthorne

American author (1804–1864)

Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.

He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that town. Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824,^[1] and graduated in 1825. He published his first work in 1828, the novel Fanshawe; he later tried to suppress it, feeling that it was not equal to the standard of his later work.^[2] He published several short stories in periodicals, which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The following year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at the Boston Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a successi