Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was a nineteenth-century American novelist and short story writer. He is recognized, with his close contemporaries Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, as a key figure in the development of a distinctly American literature.

Like Melville, Hawthorne was preoccupied with New England's religious past. For Melville religious doubt was an unspoken subtext to much of his fiction, while Hawthorne brooded over the Puritan experience in his novels and short stories. The direct descendant of John Hathorne, a presiding judge at the Salem witch trials in 1692, Hawthorne struggled to come to terms with Puritanism within his own sensibility and as the nation expanded geographically and intellectually.

In Hawthorne's greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter, set in a seventeenth-century Puritan town, Hester Pryme is forced to wear a scarlet letter A because of an adulterous relationship with the Reverend Arthur Dimmsdale, whose identity she steadfastly protects. While not condoning the adultery, the novel presents Hester and her child, Pearl, as purified through the ordeal of public condemnation, while the Puritan townspeople and clergy are revealed as hypocrites and Hester's moral inferiors. 

Contrary to the meticulous social realism that dominated European prose in the nineteenth century, Hawthorne's tales explore problems of sin, guilt, and hypocrisy through allegory and emphasis on the supernatural. Hawthorne was also a friend and neighbor of leading New England Transcendentalists and shared their reverence for nature and impatience with religious orthodoxy. Hawthorne's works offer a probing investigation into the psychology of nineteenth-century America as it moved beyond its Puritan past toward a more inclusive national identity.