Longfellow, Hawthorne and Poe - A Collective View of Their Lives

When you study 19th century literature, you will find that many authors were friends and corresponded with each other. Some of their correspondence and papers survive to this day. Three interesting figures who interacted in each other's lives are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

All three men were born in New England states in the first decade of the 19th century. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine in 1807 and Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, although Poe was adopted at any early age and raised elsewhere.

Longfellow and Hawthorne first met each other at Bowdoin College in the early 1820s, where they were classmates, along with future President, Franklin Pierce. These three college buddies remained lifelong friends.

Some of Poe's early schooling took place in Scotland and England, while his adopted family lived abroad. Returning stateside, after a year at the University of Virginia, Poe traveled to Boston in 1827 where he released his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems by 'a Bostonian'.

While Poe continued to publish his poems and find ways to support himself, Longfellow, after travels in Europe, came back to America to teach. He spoke and read many languages and translated many works into English and wrote textbooks in French, Spanish and Italian. He began publishing his poetry in 1837. His still famous poem, The Village Blacksmith, was published in 1839.

Hawthorne wrote in obscurity for many years while working as a weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom House. He became more well-known with the publication of his Twice Told Tales in 1837. He published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 and two years later, in 1852 he wrote the campaign biography of his old friend Franklin Pierce. This led to a position as United States consul in Liverpool, England when Pierce was elected President.

Poe's reviewed the works of Longfellow and Hawthorne in the course of his editorial work and his accusations of plagiarism and scathing reviews erupted into a public feud with Longfellow in the early 1840s. However, after Poe's death in 1849 at age 40, Longfellow generously bought several volumes of Poe's works in an effort to financially help Poe's mother-in-law, Maria Clemm.

Poe and Longfellow both lost their wives under sorrowful circumstances. Certainly, the spectre of the dreaded disease, tuberculosis, haunted Poe's life, since his mother, a brother and his wife all were its victims. It is widely believed that Poe poured his love and devotion and his grief for his wife, Virginia, into the poem, Annabel Lee. Longfellow lost his first wife, Mary, when ill health following a miscarriage overtook her. His second wife, Fanny, died tragically in a fire. Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, survived him.

Poe was only 40 years old when he died. Nathaniel Hawthorne also became friends with Herman Melville who dedicated his novel, Moby-Dick, to Hawthorne. Ill health took Hawthorne's life just two months shy of his 60th birthday in 1864. Longfellow was the most commercially successful of the three writers during their lifetimes. He continued to write and died at the age of 75 in 1882.

You can gain a much greater insight into the time period, minds and lives of many authors and glean a great deal of interesting information by reading their surviving correspondence.