Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) was born in the seaport city of Salem, Massachusetts in 1804 to a prominent New England family: his father was a merchant ship captain and his great-grandfather was a judge in the notorious Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Hawthorne spent his early years between Maine and Massachusetts and attended Bowdoin College. At Bowdoin, Hawthorne met writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce. In 1842 he married Sophia Peabody and the couple returned from Concord to Salem, where Hawthorne became surveyor of the port at the Custom House. At the time, the surveyorship was a political position and in 1849 Hawthorne lost his job due to a change in the political party in the White House. Despite his unhappiness with his job loss, Hawthorne entered a productive period in 1849 when he began to write The Scarlet Letter, which opens with a chapter about “the Custom House” drawn directly from his own experience. After leaving Salem, Hawthorne and his family moved to Lenox, Massachusetts where he met Herman Melville. He published The House of the Seven Gables in 1851 and The Blithedale Romance in 1852. Hawthorne spent the rest of his life in Boston and abroad as a foreign consul.
Major works by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Twice-Told Tales (1837)
Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)
The Scarlet Letter (1850)
The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
The Blithedale Romance (1852)
The Life of Franklin Pierce (biography, 1852)
The Marble Faun (1860)
Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Web
This student site from Florida Gulf Coast University offers four short essays on “Young Goodman Brown” and an annotated bibliography.
The North Shore Community College in Massachusetts has created this extensive site devoted to the study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life in Salem.
The Peabody Essex Museum hosted this online interactive exhibit for the bicentennial of Hawthorne’s birth in 1804.