Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer, born in Salem, Massachusetts, on 4 July 1804, and he died on 19 May 1864. He came from an old New England family, and his Puritan ancestors, including one who took part in the Salem witch trials, haunted his imagination for the rest of his life. After college he spent years writing quietly and published tales in magazines before he found a wider audience. He worked for a time in the customs service and lived for a while in Concord, among other writers and thinkers, and he also spent years abroad. His best-known novels, The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, explore guilt, secrecy, pride and the weight of the past in colonial and early America. He also wrote tales and books for children that retold myths. Hawthorne matters because he helped shape American fiction, using the dark, symbolic romance to examine conscience and moral life, and he influenced later writers such as Melville and Henry James.