Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (originally Hathorne; he added the "h" to the name in later years) became a reader when he was injured as a child; he had injured a leg playing ball. He was being educated at home by a tutor, Joseph Emerson Worcester, the man who was Noah Webster's foremost competition in the field of lexicography. It was from this education that was born his vivacious love of reading, which later in life, Hawthorne blamed for his "cursed habits of solitude." In fact, it might have been a learned habit or inherited personality from his mother, who was by nature a very reclusive woman.

Hawthorne was born July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel and Elizabeth Manning Hathorne. His Puritan family had long lived in New England, and he had very sentimental feelings about his home. When writing The Scarlet Letter, he wrote of such feelings as "to the deep and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil...in the wild and forest-bordered settlement...mingled their earthly substance with the soil." And that New England must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets." (143-163)

He had two sisters, Elizabeth and Louisa. In 1808 his father, the captain of a ship, died of yellow fever in 1808 Surinam (Dutch Guiana). His mother could not afford to support the family so she moved in with her relatives, specifically her parents, yet relied on the whole of the Manning family for help. Eventually, her brother built her a house in Raymond, Maine. As Nathaniel became of age to attend college, his mother sent him back to Salem to study only a lawyer named Benjamin Lynde Oliver. During that time he began his newspaper, The Spectator. It was read mostly by family.

To return to his mother and sisters, Hawthorne enrolled in Bowdoin college back in Maine in 1821. He formed some important friendships there, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Jonathan Cilley. While there he contemplated his future profession; of this matter, he wrote to his mother:

The being a minister is of course out of the Question. I should not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place, and to live and die as calm and tranquil as--a puddle of water. As to lawyers, there are so many of them already that one half of them (upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation. A physician, then, seems to be "Hobson's choice"; but yet I should not like to live by the diseases and infirmities of my fellow Creatures. And it would weigh very heavily on my conscience if, in the course of my practice, I should chance to send any unlucky patient "ad inferum," which being interpreted is "to the realms below." Oh that I was rich enough to live without a profession. What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support upon my pen? I think the illegibility of my handwriting is very author-like. How proud you would feel to see my works praised by the reviewers, as equal to proudest productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull. But authors are always poor devils, and therefore Satan may take them. (183-218)

His family had moved back to Salem by the time he'd graduated, and therefore he too moved back. When in 1825 no one wanted to publish his first novel, Fanshawe, he published it himself. But it was a failed book, and he regretted having published it. He attempted to retrieve the books that were in the public; he succeeded in getting them back from the family, and few copies remained.

Samuel Griswold Goodrich proved a very valuable asset to Hawthorne's career. Not only did he publish several of Hawthorne's short stories in his magazine (annual Christmas book, actually) The Token. It was also to Goodrich's thanks that Hawthorne landed his first real position in the literary world of Boston. Goodrich was a director of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, published by the Bewick Company, in Boston, and Hawthorne was granted the job of editor.

Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody in 1842. She too, wrote. The couple had three children. Hawthorne wrote several short stories and novels, the most popular and successful The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, A Romance. After Franklin Pierce won the Presidency in 1852, Hawthorne was appointed U.S. consul in Liverpool. He died in his sleep in 1864.

Works Cited

Grant, William E. "Nathaniel Hawthorne." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 74: American Short-Story Writers Before 1880. E. Bobby Ellen Kimbel, Pennsylvania State University, Ogontz Campus and William E. Grant, Bowling Green State University. The Gale Group, 1988. pp. 143-163

Idol, John E. Jr. "Nathaniel Hawthorne." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 223: The American Renaissance in New England, Second Series. E. Wesley T. Mott, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The Gale Group, 2000. pp. 183-218.