Nathaniel Hawthorne

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne • American novelist and short story writer, most famous for his novel The Scarlet Letter • Born Salem, Mass. on July 4th, 1804, son of a sea captain. • He spent a solitary, bookish childhood with his widowed and reclusive mother. • After graduating from Bowdoin College, he returned to Salem and prepared for a writing career with 12 years of solitary study and writing interrupted by summer tours through the Northeast.

3. After privately publishing a novel, in1828, he began publishing stories in the Token and New England Magazine. In 1842 he married Sophia Amelia Peabody, a transcendentalist, and they moved to the transcendentalist community, Brook Farm, the center of the Transcendental movement, where he began a friendship with Henry David Thoreau. • His dismissal as a survey of the port of Salem initiated the brief period of his greatest novels: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and The Blithdale Romance (1852). • The Scarlet Letter (1850) • Study of the guilt and retribution in Puritan Boston • Biggest success, followed by The House of Seven Gables Nathaniel Hawthorne died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, on May 18th, 1864. His dismissal from the initiated the brief period of his His stories are called, “allegories of the heart” *They show how pride and isolation frustrate our capacity for love and sympathy

4. Dark Romanticism • Attitudes of Dark Romanticism • a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities • interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era • and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.