Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, came from old New England stock; in fact, one of his ancestors was a judge during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-93. (Hawthorne's feelings in this matter are part of the story of The House of the Seven Gables.) For several generations, Hawthorne's paternal ancestors followed the sea, while the family declined in wealth and social importance; his father, Captain Hathorne (Hawthorne added the "w" to the spelling of the family name after he graduated from college), died at Surinam, Dutch Guiana, when his son was four years old.
The boy was brought up in the households of his mother's family in Salem and in the back country of Maine. He was sent to Bowdoin College by his uncles. When he was graduated in 1825, Hawthorne determined to become a writer of fiction. For more than a decade he devoted himself to learning his craft, living at the family home, reading much, writing much, destroying many of his productions, but sending some of his stories to magazines and the popular "annuals," the Christmas gift-books of the time. These early works were published anonymously. After some ventures in editing and literary hackwork undertaken in an effort to support himself—the many stories he published in these years brought him little income—and after a brief period of employment in the Boston Custom House and another period as a member of the experimental socialist community at Brook Farm, Hawthorne married, at the age of thirty-eight, Miss Sophia Peabody. Thereafter, anticipating the later American pattern, he was never to have a home which he could think of as permanent. Several happy years in the Old Manse in Concord (Emerson's ancestral home) brought him into contact with Emerson and Thoreau.
Later, back in Salem again, he was employed as a Surveyor in the Salem Custom House until, losing his job for political reasons, he tried the experiment of devoting himself wholly to literature. He wrote The Scarlet Letter very quickly, following it soon after with The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and other works. In Lenox, in the Berkshires, he formed what is for us his most significant literary friendship when he became a neighbor of Herman Melville, then at work on Moby Dick, which Melville dedicated to Hawthorne. For seven years, Hawthorne was abroad, in England, where he tried to solve his financial problems by serving as United States Consul in Liverpool, and in Italy, adding steadily to his notebooks but unable to do any creative work until, at the end of his stay, he wrote The Marble Faun. Returning to Concord in 1860, he died after four unhappy years during which, working against failing health and flagging creative energies which were probably attributable to a breakdown of his psychic health, he tried to bring to satisfactory conclusions several late romances which he left unfinished at his death.
