Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography Quotes 34 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Nathaniel Hawthorne, born Nathaniel Hathorne on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, came of age in the lingering shadow of New England Puritanism. His paternal ancestor John Hathorne had been a magistrate during the Salem witch trials, a legacy the writer would later transmute into enduring fiction and moral inquiry. Hawthorne altered the family name by adding a "w", a discreet gesture often interpreted as an attempt to distance himself from that past. His father, a sea captain, died when Hawthorne was a small child, and the household thereafter was shaped by women's resilient stewardship and a sense of inwardness that would recur in his art. The coastal town of Salem, once a thriving port, was by then in gradual decline, its austere streets and layered history imprinting themselves deeply on his imagination.

Education and Apprenticeship in Letters
Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College in Maine, graduating in 1825. At Bowdoin he formed ties that would reverberate throughout his life and career. He knew the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and he established a lasting friendship with Franklin Pierce, a future president of the United States. Another friend, Horatio Bridge, later helped sustain Hawthorne's early efforts in print, offering both moral support and practical encouragement when reputations were slow to form. Following college, Hawthorne returned to Salem and entered a long apprenticeship. He published anonymous or pseudonymous stories in periodicals and gift books and experimented with modes of allegory and parable that would become hallmarks of his shorter fiction. The discipline of this formative period, coupled with the constraints of limited income, shaped his careful, highly polished style.

Emergence as a Writer
In 1837, Hawthorne gathered some of his tales in the collection Twice-Told Tales, which began to establish him among New England readers. The title announced his method: retelling familiar moral and historical motifs with new psychological insight and a modern sense of ambiguity. He continued to publish stories such as "Young Goodman Brown", "My Kinsman, Major Molineux", "The Birth-Mark", and "Rappaccini's Daughter", works that remain central to American short fiction. Their compact form allowed Hawthorne to dramatize inward conflict, secrecy, and the consequences of unacknowledged guilt, often set against a Puritan backdrop whose moral absolutes are questioned by human complexity.

Marriage, Concord, and Literary Community
Hawthorne's personal and professional worlds broadened through his connection to the Peabody family. He married Sophia Peabody in 1842, a union sustaining both partners' artistic lives; Sophia was an accomplished painter and thinker whose insight informed his work. Introduced in part through her sister, the educator Elizabeth Peabody, the couple moved to Concord, Massachusetts, and took up residence in the Old Manse. There, Hawthorne completed revisions and new pieces collected in Mosses from an Old Manse, a book that preserved his impression of that house beside the Concord River. Concord offered a crossroads of literary and reform currents. He encountered Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, while observing with a certain reserve the currents of Transcendentalism. His sensibility, skeptical of facile idealism and attuned to the darker recesses of the will, diverged from his neighbors even as he benefited from their company and from the intellectual provocations of the time.

Brook Farm and Social Experiment
In 1841, Hawthorne briefly joined the Brook Farm association, led by George Ripley, seeking both income and, perhaps, a test of communal ideals. He soon found that agricultural labor and utopian administration sat uneasily with the inner life of a writer. The experiment nonetheless gave him a living archive of experience he later refashioned in The Blithedale Romance, where he probed the gap between professed ideals and human motives, and the fine line between reform and manipulation.

Public Service, Setbacks, and The Scarlet Letter
Practical necessity led Hawthorne to government service. He held a post at the Salem Custom House, a steady position vulnerable to political changes. His dismissal following a shift in party control stung, yet it became transmuted into art: the satiric and autobiographical "Custom-House" introduction to The Scarlet Letter. Published in 1850, that novel vaulted Hawthorne to national renown. In Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, he created figures through whom he explored sin, secrecy, pride, and the possibility of redemption. The novel's tension, between public judgment and private conscience, became a standard by which American moral fiction would be measured. Its austere scaffolds, woodland spaces, and mutable symbols show Hawthorne's mastery of allegory grounded in precise social observation.

The Berkshires and Literary Friendships
After Salem, Hawthorne sought a quieter setting in the Berkshires, where the landscape and a circle of acquaintances nurtured his next works. He met Herman Melville, who admired Hawthorne's psychological depth; Melville's dedication of Moby-Dick pays tribute to that influence and to the friendship that flickered with intensity during those years. Hawthorne wrote The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a novel steeped in the morbid fascination of ancestral guilt and the hope of renewal, and The Blithedale Romance (1852), a keenly observed anatomy of community and desire. He also produced retellings of classical myths for younger readers, A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys and, later, Tanglewood Tales, revealing a lighter register of his narrative art while remaining faithful to the moral resonances that attracted him.

Politics, Loyalty, and Consular Duty
Hawthorne's longstanding friendship with Franklin Pierce drew him, cautiously, toward national politics. In 1852 he wrote a campaign biography of Pierce, a gesture of personal loyalty rather than partisan fervor, and upon Pierce's election he accepted appointment as United States consul at Liverpool. The position provided income and security at a moment when literary earnings alone were precarious. His years abroad widened his imaginative compass, exposed him to European art and history, and gave him a different vantage point on American democratic experiments.

Europe and The Marble Faun
Following his consular service, Hawthorne traveled on the Continent, spending extended time in Italy. There he conceived The Marble Faun (1860), a romance of art, innocence, crime, and conscience set among Roman ruins and studios. The book mirrors his preoccupations, moral ambiguity, secrecy, the costs of knowledge, now refracted through European scenes. The notebooks he kept in England and Italy preserve a careful observer's eye for detail: weathered stone, dim churches, and passing faces, all registered with the same morally tinged curiosity that animates his fiction.

Return to Concord and Late Work
Back in Massachusetts, Hawthorne settled at The Wayside in Concord, a home associated with Bronson Alcott before the Hawthornes acquired it. He continued to write but struggled with health and with projects that would not cohere to his exacting standards. He prepared portions of romances that remained unfinished, including The Dolliver Romance and Septimius Felton, texts that show his continued interest in the intersection of science, faith, and the perennial dream of renewal. Friends and publishers such as James T. Fields remained attentive to his reputation and the posthumous fate of the fragments, while his family life, shared with Sophia and their children, anchored his last years even as his energies waned.

Death and Burial
In May 1864, while traveling in New Hampshire with Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne died in his sleep. The quietness of his death, far from public ceremony, seemed a fitting close to a career attuned to inward reckonings. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, among the writers and acquaintances whose company had shaped the literary life of New England.

Themes, Style, and Legacy
Hawthorne's achievement rests on his ability to transmute historical memory and inherited moral codes into stories of conscience. He wrote not as an antiquarian but as a psychologist of the moral imagination, probing how private motives collide with public judgment. His prose, deliberate and symbolic, makes frequent use of ambiguity. Objects and settings, scarlet cloth, weathered timbers, gardens, shadows, light, become instruments of meaning without yielding to didacticism. He is a central figure in the development of the American romance, a mode distinct from strict realism, granting the imagination room to distill the moral essence of a situation.

The circle around him underscores his place in the broader culture. With Henry Wadsworth Longfellow he shared collegiate origins; with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau he shared a town and, sometimes, gentle contention; with Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller he shared an era's argument about reform; with Herman Melville he shared a fascination with the limits of knowledge and the darkness of the soul; with Franklin Pierce he shared loyalty and the burdens of public life. Through these ties one sees a writer perpetually at the hinge between solitude and society, maintaining skepticism toward easy optimism while insisting on the possibility of dignity amid human fallibility.

Hawthorne's major works, most notably The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun, remain vital not only for their historical relevance but for their continued power to unsettle and clarify. His shorter tales stand as paradigms of compact moral drama. Together, they secure his standing as one of the essential novelists and storytellers of the United States, a writer who made the old New England conscience speak to modern anxieties, and whose meditations on guilt, complicity, and compassion continue to command attention.

Our collection contains 34 quotes who is written by Nathaniel, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Justice.

Other people realated to Nathaniel: Horace Mann (Educator), James Russell Lowell (Poet), George Edward Woodberry (Critic), Carl Clinton Van Doren (Critic), Van Wyck Brooks (Critic), Edwin Percy Whipple (Writer)

• 1860 The Marble Faun (Novel)
• 1852 The Blithedale Romance (Novel)
• 1851 The House of the Seven Gables (Novel)
• 1850 The Scarlet Letter (Novel)
• 1846 Mosses from an Old Manse (Short Story Collection)
• 1837 Twice-Told Tales (Short Story Collection)

• Wikipedia