Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804; one of his ancestors had sat as a judge at the town's witch trials, and he added a w to his name, probably to distance himself from him. His father, a sea captain, died far from home when the child was four. At Bowdoin, his fellow students included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the future president Franklin Pierce; he then lived for about ten years in seclusion at his mother's house, burning part of what he wrote. He worked at the customs houses of Boston and then Salem, served as consul in Liverpool, was a friend of Herman Melville, and died in 1864.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelThe Scarlet LetterNathaniel Hawthorne · 1850LiteraturePublic domain