Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a famous nineteenth century American novelist. He belonged to a family of magistrates, judges, sailors and clergymen. Two of his ancestors were William Hathorne, a magistrate who condemned a Quaker woman to public whipping and John Hathorne, a judge at the notorious Salem Witch Trials. Nathaniel added an extra ‘W’ in his surname to conceal this line of heritage. He used New England as the setting of his novels and most of his works are moral allegories inspired by Puritan ideologies. The works are psychologically complex and often contain moral lessons. Hawthorne’s oeuvre is considered to be a representative of Dark Romanticism, a significant aspect of the Romantic Movement. Apart from novels and short stories, he also wrote a biography of his classmate and friend, Franklin Pierce. Hawthorne was part of ‘Brook Farm’, a transcendentalist community where he came in contact with a number of philosophers and thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. However, he became disenchanted with Transcendentalism and documented his feelings about it in the fictional work ‘The Blithedale Romance’. For four years, he served as a consular in Liverpool, Lancashire. During his last years, his writings became incoherent and showed symptoms of psychic decay. Nathaniel Hawthorne died in his sleep, while on a trip with his friend Pierce.