Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, an old Puritan seaport. His ancestor John Hathorne was one of the judges at the Salem witch trials of 1692, a family history that left him with a lifelong sense of guilt; he even added a letter to his surname to set himself apart from his forebears. His father died at sea when he was four, and he grew up with his mother. After college he returned to Salem and for twelve years lived in seclusion in a small room in his mother's house, reading and writing; he called them his 'solitary years'. He worked as a customs surveyor, joined the Transcendentalist community at Brook Farm, and knew Emerson, Thoreau and Melville. When his college friend Franklin Pierce became President, he appointed Hawthorne consul in Liverpool. A searching explorer of sin and conscience, he is regarded as the master of the American Romantic novel.