Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Picture of The Old Manse
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Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. He grew up in a Puritan family who saw the importance in law and commerce and was always chasing after it. Hawthorne never had the privilege of knowing his father who died as a sea captain in Dutch Guiana when Hawthorne was only four years old. Hawthorne once called himself “‘the obscurest man of letters in America’” (A Brief Biography and Introduction, 312). He attended school at Bowdoin College in Maine where he graduated with poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the future president Franklin Pierce. Afterwards, he returned home to live with his mother once again, for the next twelve years. He worked at the Boston Custom House so that he could earn enough money to marry. He was later able to marry Sophia Peabody in the summer of 1842. He and his wife moved to Concord, Massachusetts where they lived in The Old Manse.
His career as a writer did not start so easily and in fact, he struggled for a while before he achieved success. His stories are complex and intriguing in such a way that the reader is left in a place to evaluate the situation in the story as well as thinking about their own life. As a writer, he intentionally writes about those who suffer from internal conflicts and who are consumed by their own passions. All of his stories tend to have more of a gloomy feeling towards them and rarely a happy ending. In 1860 he wrote The Marble Farm which was his final fictional story. He was appointed to the U.S. consulship of Liverpool by President Pierce in 1853 and afterwards he traveled to Europe. His life ended on a trip in 1864 with Franklin pierce in New Hampshire. Hawthorne wrote about 120 stories in his lifetime. Meyer, M. (2014). The compact Bedford introduction to literature (10th ed.). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's. |