I.

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

1. Life and Career
- Born on July 4, 1804, in Salem Massachusetts, in a strict Puritan family, which
affected his perspectives and writing styles
- Developed appetite for reading and set his sights on becoming a writer during
time immobile due to injury on leg at an early age
- In his career, Hawthorne spent 12 years in his hometown from 1825 to 1837.
During these 12 years, he read many of the books in the Boston Public Library
and learned about the ancient historical stories of his hometown and the witchcraft
era. Under the effects of the European literary and his intention to create a kind of
national literature, Hawthorne began his writing career shortly after he graduated
from College and soon found his voice self-publishing several stories, among
them are:
+ An Old Woman’s Tale (1830)
+ My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832)
+ Twice Told Tales (1837)
- Experience of working in many positions such as customs officer, U.S. consul,
living in many different regions, relationships with many people is a great source
of inspiration for him to create famous works. In 1848, lost his appointment due
to political favoritism. The dismissal turned into a blessing giving him time to
write his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter
- Other famous works include The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Marble
Faun (1860).
2. Themes and Literary styles
- Hawthorne's works belong to romanticism or, more specifically, dark
romanticism, cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most
inherent natural qualities of humanity.
- Hawthorne’s life was steeped in the Puritan legacy, so he naturally wrote against
puritanism. His novel is good at describing the dark side and evil of the characters
to deeply explore the Puritan crime of society, nature, and human nature.
- Hawthorne’s high rank among American fiction writers is the result of at least
three considerations.
+ Impressive arthitectonic sense of form: The structure of The Scarlet Letter,
for example, is so tightly integrated that no chapter, no paragraph, even,
could be omitted without doing violence to the whole. The book’s four
characters are bound together in the tangled web of a life situation that
seems to have no solution, and the tightly woven plot has a unity of action.
+ He was also the master of a classic literary style: directness, clarity,
firmness, sureness of idiom.
+ His use of allegory and symbolism makes Hawthorne one of the most
studied writers. Hawthorne defined a romance as being radically different
 from a novel by not being concerned with the possible or probable course
of ordinary experience.
- He was also highly appreciated due to his moral insight: He looked more deeply
and perhaps more honestly into life, finding in it much suffering and conflict but
also finding the redeeming power of love.
=> Hawthorne’s work initiated the most durable tradition in American fiction, that of the
symbolic romance that assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and
ambiguities of man’s choices. His greatest short stories and The Scarlet Letter are marked by a
depth of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled by any American writer.