Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter and the Minister's Black Veil

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864, is considered one of the great masters of American fiction, with tales and novels that reflect deep explorations of moral and spiritual conflicts (Hawthorne pp). He descended from a prominent Puritan family, and when he was fourteen years old, he and his widowed mother moved to a remote farm in Maine (Hawthorne pp). Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College, 1821-1825, and afterwards devoted himself to writing, publishing his first novel in 1829 (Hawthorne pp). He attempted living at Brook Farm, a community experiment begun by a group of Transcendentalists, but was less than enthusiastic by what he saw as hypocrisy and excessive idealism (Canada pp). In 1842, he married Sophia Peabody, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and they settled in Concord (Hawthorne pp). To support them, he took a job...
[ View Full Essay]