Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804—May 19, 1864)

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne(July 4, 1804—May 19, 1864) Mr. Hoffman English 10

2. Biography • Born in Salem, Mass., in 1804 to Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne. • Later changed his last name to Hawthorne, adding a “w”, to dissociate with such relatives as John Hathorne, a judge during the famous Salem Witch Trials.

3. Childhood • His father, a sea captain, died in 1808 in Suriname. • Hawthorne, his mother, and two sisters, then moved in with maternal relatives, the Mannings, in Salem, where they lived for ten years. • On November 10, 1813, Hawthorne was hit on the leg while playing “bat and ball” and became lame and bedridden for a year, although many physicians could find nothing wrong with him.

4. Teenage years • In the summer of 1816, they moved to a home built specifically for his family by his uncles, Richard and Robert Manning, in Raymond, Maine. • In 1819, he was sent back to Salem for school. • He complained of homesickness and missing his mother and sisters; however, he finished and moved on to college.

5. College • Attended college at Bowdoin College in Maine. • In college, by his own judgment, he was an idle student, “rather choosing to nurse my own fancies than to dig into Greek roots.” • Classmates included future president Franklin Pierce and future poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

6. End of College • He chewed tobacco, played cards, drank wine at the taverns, and avoided intellectual company in favor of pleasure. • After graduation in 1825, he wrote to his sister Elizabeth, “I shall never make a distinguished figure in the world, and all I hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude.”

7. Held Prisoner • Returning to Salem, Hawthorne set himself up in what he called the “dismal chamber,” a room on the third floor of the family home. • He kept himself a virtual prisoner there for the next twelve years, until he learned the craft of fiction.

8. Early Works • In 1837, Hawthorne emerged to a publish a collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales. • They offer a vision of the human heart as a lurking place for the secrets of past sins. • It won him just enough success to encourage future work.

9. Marriage • Hawthorne courted and became engaged to Sophia Peabody, and he briefly joined the utopianexperiment in communal living at Brook Farm. • Neither the shoveling of manure nor the endless,lofty discussions of the Transcendentalistsappealed to him.

10. Home After Marriage • After their marriage in 1842, they moved into the Old Manse in Concord, where Emerson had lived before them. • Hawthorne often walked with Thoreau and Emerson, but no warm friendship resulted from these meetings.

11. The Old Manse

12. Children • Three children • Daughter Una Hawthorne, born March 3, 1844. • Son Julian Hawthorne, born June 22, 1846. • Daughter Rose Hawthorne, bornMay 1851

13. Life in Concord • Hawthorne accepted a political appointment as a surveyor to the Salem customhouse in 1846. • In 1849, despite losing his job and simultaneously losing his mother, he somehow found the energies for his masterwork, The Scarlet Letter. • It was, he said, “positively a hell-fired story, into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light.”

14. The End • In 1853, President Franklin Pierce—Hawthorne’s old frined from Bowdoin—offered him the post of U.S. consul at Liverpool. • Hawthorne and his family lived there for seven years. • He returned to America in 1860.

15. The End (cont’d) • Pierce was defeated for a reelection and Abraham Lincoln was in the White House. • Hawthorne felt out of harmony with his times. • On the night of May 18, 1864, while on a trip with Pierce, Hawthorne died in a New Hampshire hotel room.

16. In Death • Emerson felt that Hawthorne, no longer able to endure his solitude, “died of it.” • He recorded this sadly ironic anecdote after attending Hawthorne’s funeral:“One day, when I found him on the top of his hill, in the woods, he paced back the path to his house, and said, `This path is the only remembrance of me that will remain.’”