Novelist and short story writer, a central figure in the American Renaissance. Nathaniel Hawthorne's best-known works include The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Like Edgar Allan Poe, Hawthorne took a dark view of human nature.

"For example, then," continued Holgrave;" a dead man, if he happen to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos ! We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity according to dead men's forms and creeds! Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! (from The House of the Seven Gables, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1943, p. 175)

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts. His father, Nathaniel Hathorne, was a sea captain and descendent of Colonel John Hathorne, one of the judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. According to a story, he also brought down a curse on the subsequent Hathornes by one of the accused witches. John's father William hunted Quakers "like a blood-hound" and once he had a woman dragged half naked through the town while being lashed with a whip.

When the young Nathaniel was four year old, his father died of yellow fever in Surinam. Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne, his mother, withdrew to a life of seclusion, which she maintained till her death. From Salem the family moved to Raymond, Maine, where Hawthorne enjoyed  the surrounding natural resources and freedom far away from churches and schools. He also became a good shot and an excellent fisherman. "How often do I long for my gun, and wish that I could againg savagize with you," he lamented to his sister Louisa when he had to return to Salem. "But I shall never again run wild in Raymond, and I shall never be so happy as when I did."

From his childhood Hawthorne was a voracous reader. He consumed stories, novels, and poetry – Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, Samuel Johnson, Byron, Burns, and Henry Fielding, just to mention a few. In 1821 he entered the Bowdoin College, where his friends includeded Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, who became the 14th president of the U.S. During his senior years, he attended lectures at the Maine Medical School. Between the years 1825 and 1836, Hawthorne worked as a writer and contributor to periodicals. John L. O'Sullivan's magazine the Democratic Review published two dozen stories by him. After publishers rejected his first short-story collection, Seven Tales of My Native Land , Hawthorne burned the manuscript. Hawthorne's first novel, Fanshawe (1828), appeared anonymously at his own expense. The work was based on his college life. It did not receive much attention and the author destroyed the unsold copies. However, the book initiated a friendship between Hawthorne and the publisher Samuel Goodrich.

Hawthorne edited in 1836 the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in Boston, and compiled in 1837 Peter Parley's Universal History  for children. In was followed by a series of books for children, Grandfather's Chair (1841), Famous Old People (1841), Liberty Tree (1841), and Biographical Stories for Children (1842). In 1841 he resigned his post at the Boston Custom House and briefly considered starting a magazine with Longfellow. However, Longfellow was not enthusiastic about the idea.

Hawthorne's second, expanded edition of Twice-Told Tales (1837), was praised by Edgar Allan Poe in Graham's Magazine. "We know of few compositions which the critic can more honestly commend that these Twice-Told Tales," Poe stated. "As Americans, we feel proud of the book." Among Hawthorne's most widely anthologized stories are 'Young Goodman Brown' (1835), originally published in the New-England Magazine, 'The Birthmark (1843), published in Pioneer, and 'Rappacini's Daughter' (1844), which first appeared in Democratic Review, and was collected in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). 'Young Goodman Brown,' included in this collection, is an allegorical tale, in which Hawthorne touches many of his favorite themes, such as hypocrisy, witchcraft, the Puritan guilt, and the sins of fathers. The protagonist, a young man, is from Salem. Against the wishes of his wife, named Faith, he sets off on a journey through the dark woods, and returns home a changed man, disillusioned after nightmarish experiences.

Hawthorne became friends with the Transcendentalists in Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who also drew on the Puritan legacy. Generally he did not have much confidence in intellectuals and artists, and eventually he had to admit that "the treasure of intellectual gold" did not provide food for his family. In 1842 Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody, an active participant in the Transcendentalist movement. Only the bride's family attended the wedding.

When Hawthorne and his wife Sophia moved to The Old Manse in Concord,  Thoreau planted a vegetable garden – beans, Indian corn, and summer squash – for them. Eventually there was superabundance of cabbages. A growing family and mounting debts compelled their return to Salem. Unable to earn a living as a writer, he took a job as a surveyor of the Port of Salem. Once he wrote to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "I have locked myself in a dungeon and I can't find the key to get out." He worked there for three years until he was fired. "I detest this town so much," Hawthorne said, "that I hate to go out into the streets, or to have people see me."

The Scarlet Letter was a critical and popular success, although Rev. Arthur Cleveland Coxe said in his review that "under-tide of filth has become as requisite to a romance, as death in the fifth act to a tragedy? Is the French era actually begun in our literature?" (Church Review, January, 1851, no. 3) The illicit love affair of Hester Prynne with the Reverend Arhur Dimmesdale and the birth of their child Pearl, takes place before the book opens. In Puritan New England, Hester, the mother of an illegitimate child, wears the scarlet A (for adulteress, named in the book by this initial) for years rather than reveal that her lover was the saintly young village minister. Her husband, Roger Chillingworth, proceeds to torment the guiltstricken man, who confesses his adultery before dying in Hester's arms. Hester plans to take her daughter Pearl to Europe and begin a new life. Toward the end of the dark romance Hawthorne wrote: "Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!" Hester Prynne has been seen as a pioneer feminist in the line from Anne Hutchinson to Margaret Fuller, but also as a classic nurturer, a sexually autonomous woman, and an American equivalent of Anna Karenina. The influence of the novel is apparent in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), and  William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (1930). Hawthorne's daughter Una, christened after Spenser's heroine in The Faerie Queene, served as the model for Pearl. Unhappy since her childhood, she died at the age of thirty-three. "It was impossible she would ever be happy," said her friend.

Hawthorne was one of the first American writers to explore the hidden motivations of his characters. Among his allegorical stories is 'The Artist of the Beautiful' (1844) in which his protagonist creates an insect, perhaps a steam-driven butterfly. A girl he admires asks whether he made it, and he answers: "Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful?" Eventually the insect is killed by an unfeeling child. Of his own workroom Hawthorne said: "This deserves to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands and thousands of visions have appeared to me in it."

"The Custom-House" sketch, prefatory to The Scarlet Letter, was based partly on Hawthorhe's experiences in Salem. His picture of the sin-obsessed Puritans has subsequently been criticized - they were less extreme than presented in the works of Arthur Miller, Steven King, and many others. The House of the Seven Gables was published the following year. The story is based on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne's own family by a woman, who was condemned to death during the Salem witchcraft trials.

Hawthorne set the events in the mid 19th century, generations after the trial, in which Colonel Pyncheon,  in order to seize the  land owned by Matthew Maule, has him hanged as a wizard. At the execution, Maule utters a prophecy: "God will give him blood to drink!" The curse is mirrored in the decay of the Pyncheons' seven-gabled mansion, built on the top of Maule's small hut. Finally the last descendant of the Maules, a young daguerreotypist named Holgrave, falls in love with  Phoebe Pyncheon, a country kinswoman of the owner of the decaying house. Their union will end the hostilities between the two families. Noteworthy, Hawthore himself wrote in the preface that the "personage of the tale . . . are really of the author's own making, or, at all events, of his own mixing; their virtues can shed no luster, nor their defects redound, in the remotest degree, to the discredit of the venerable town of which they profess to be inhabitants." Members of the Pynchon family protested Hawthorne's "abuse" of their good name (which he spelled Pyncheon). Although Hawthorne denied any knowledge of a "real" Pynchon family, there is evidence that he knew the name. Nevertheless, the author apologized and offered to write an explanatory preface for the second edition – "else the wretched old Pyncheons will have no peace in the other world, nor I in this."

The Blithedale Romance (1852), set in a utopian New England community, examines the flaws inherent in practical utopianism. Hawthorne had earlier invested and lived in the Brook Farm Commune, West Roxbury. This led to speculations, that the doomed heroine was a portrait of the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. During this productive period Hawthorne also established a warm friendship with Herman Melville, who dedicated Moby-Dick to him.

In 1853 Franklin Pierce became President. Hawthorne, who had written a campaign biography for him, was appointed consul in Liverpool, England. He lived there for four years, and then spent a year and half in Italy writing The Marble Faun (1860), a story about the conflict between innocence and guilt. It was his last completed novel. In his Concord home, The Wayside, he wrote the essays contained in Our Old Home (1863). Hawthorne died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, N.H. on a trip to the mountains with his friend Franklin Pierce. His personal estate amounted to twenty-six thousand three hundred twenty-two dollars and sixty-one cents. It included furniture, a two-hundred-dollar library, several shares in local banks, Union States coupon bonds, promissory notes, stock in the Boston & Maine Railroad and in the Jamaica Plain Gas Company, The Wayside and its seventeen acres, and copyrights. (Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple, 2003, p. 397) Hawthorne was buried in Sleepy Hollow cemetery. After his death, Sophia Hawthorne edited and published his notebooks. Modern editions of these works include many of the sections which she cut out or altered. The author's son Julian, who became writer and the president of the Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Ltd., was convicted in 1912 of defrauding the public.

For further reading: Hawthorne by Henry James (1879); Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife by Julian Hawthorne (1884); Hawthorne by Newton Arwin (1929); Nathaniel Hawthorne: Man and Writer by Edward Wagenknecht (1961); Hawthorne's Fiction by Richard Harter Fogle (1964); The Shape of Hawthorne's Career by Nina Baym (1976); New Essays on "The Scarlet Letter," ed. by Michael J. Colacurcio (1985); Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. by Harold Bloom (1986); Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Man, His Tales and Romances by Edward Wagenknecht (1989); Nathaniel Hawthorne by Charles Swann (1991); Hawthorne's Narrative Strategies by Michael Dunne (1995); 'Hawthorne's Puritans: From Fact to Fiction' by  Deborah Lea Madsen, in Journal of American Studies (1999, vol. 33, no. 3); Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple (2003); Study Guide for The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Mary R. Reichardt (2009); The Melville-Hawthorne Connection: a Study of the Literary Friendship by Erik Hage (2014); Certain Concealments: Poe, Hawthorne, and Early Nineteenth-century Abortion by Dana Elizabeth Medoro (2022); Hawthorne's Prophets: The Bible and the Creation of American Literature by Fay Elanor Ellwood (2024); Political Liberalism and the Rise of American Romanticism by Scott M. Reznick (2024). Note: Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who began publishing short fiction in 1870. Many of JH's novellas and short stories are weird tales of curses and apparitions, some drawing inspiration from his Swedenborgian faith. His career was interrupted by a jail term. He moved to California, where he wrote for newspapers, pulp magazine All-Story Weekly, and edited series of anthologies. His daughter Hildegarde (1871-1952) also published some fantasy, which can be found in Faded Garden (1985, ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson).  Suom.: Kirjailijalta on myös ilmestynyt novellivalikoima Paholainen käsikirjoituksessa (suom. Arvi Tamminen) ja Onnen laakso (1994)

Selected works:

• Fanshawe: A Tale, 1828
• My Kinsman, Major Molineux; Roger Malvin’s Burial, 1832 (stories)
• Young Goodman Brown, 1835
• Twice-Told Tales, 1837 (expanded 1842)
  - film: 1963, dir. by Sidney Salkow, starring Vincent Price, Sebastian Cabot, Mari Blanchard, Brett Halsey, Richard Denning; adaptations of 'Dr Heidegger's Experiment', 'Rappacini'c Daughter' and the prologue to The House of the Seven Gables
• The Gentle Boy: a Thrice Told Tale, 1838
• Grandfather's Chair: a History for Youth, 1841
• Famous Old People, 1841
• Liberty Tree: With the Last Words of Grandfather's Chair, 1841
• Biographical Stories for Children, 1842
• Mosses From an Old Manse, 1846 (2 vols.)
• The Celestial Rail-road, 1847
• The Scarlet Letter: A Romace, 1850
  - Tulipunainen kirjain (suom. Aune Brotherus, 1945)
  - films: 1926, dir. Victor Sjöström, starring Lillian Gish; 1972 (Der Scharlachrote Buchstabe), dir. Wim Wenders; 1934, dir. Robert G. Vignola; 1995, dir. Roland Joffé, starring Demi Moore, Gary Oldman, Robert Duvall
• The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance 1851
  - Seitsenpäätyinen talo (suom. Aune Brotherus, 1957)
  - film: 1940, dir. Joe May, starring George Sanders, Margaret Lindsay, Vincent Price, Nan Grey
• The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales, 1851
• True Stories from History and Biography, 1851
• A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, 1851 (with engravings by Baker)
• The Blithedale Romance, 1852
  - Onnen laakso (suomentanut Arvi Tamminen, 1994)
• The Life of Franklin Pierce, 1852
• Sunday at home, and Other Tales, 1853
• Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls, 1853
• The Marble Faun; or, The Romance Of Monte Beni, 1860
• Our Old Home: A Series Of English Sketches, 1863
• The Snow-Image A Childish Miracle, 1864
• Passages from the American Notebooks, 1868 (edited by Sophia Hawthorne)
• Passages from English Note-Books, 1870 (edited by Sophia Hawthorne)
• Hawthorne's Works, 1871-81 (6 vols.; illustrated library edition)
• The Memoir of Nathaniel Hawthorne: With Stories Now First Published in This Country, 1872
• Septimus Felton, or The Elixir of Life, 1872 (fragment)
• Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, 1872 (edited by Sophia Hawthorne)
• The Dolliver Romance, and Other Pieces, 1876 (fragment)
• A Virtuoso's Collection, and Other Tales, 1877
• Dr. Grimishawe's Secret: A Romance, 1883 (fragment)
• The Ancestral Footsteps, 1883 (fragment)
• Sketches and Studies, 1883
• Tales, Sketches, and Other Papers: With a Biographical Sketch, 1883
• The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1884 (12 vols., with introductory notes by George P. Lathrop)
• Little Daffydowndilly and Other Stories, 1887
• Tales Of The White Hills: And Sketches, 1889
• Footprints On the Seashore, 1892 (with etched illustrations, by Louis K. Harlow)
• Colonial Stories: Being Legends Of The Province House, 1897 (illustrated by Frank T. Merrill)
• Dr. Heidegger's Experiment, 1897
• Miscellanies: Biographical and Other Sketches and Letters, 1900
• The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1902 (14 vols.)
• The Complete Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1900 (22 vols.)
• Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny: A Diary, 1904
• The Miraculous Pitcher, and Biographical Stories, 1905
• Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, 1907 (edited for school use by Robert H. Beggs)
• Letters of Hawthorne to William D. Ticknor, 1851-1864, 1910 (2 vols.)
• The Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1927 (selected, with and introduction, by John Brooks Moore)
• Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1928 (selected and edited by Carl Van Doren)
• The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1937 (edited, with an introduction, by Norman Holmes Pearson)
• The English Notebooks, 1941 (edited by Randall Stewart)
• Haethorne as Editor, 1941 (selected by Arlin Turner)
• Hawthorne's Short Stories, 1946 (edited by Newton Arwin)
• The Maypole Of Merrymount: From Twice Told Tales, 1947
• The Portable Hawthorne, 1948 (ed., with an introd. and notes, by Malcolm Cowley)
• The Best of Hawthorne, 1951 (edited with introd. and notes by Mark Van Doren)
• The Tale of King Midas and the Golden Touch, 1952 (illustrated with color lithographs by Fritz Eichenberg)
• Complete Short Stories, 1959
• The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1962-1997 (23 vols., edited by William Charvat et al.)
• Hawthorne: Tales of His Native Land, 1962 (edited by Neal Frank Doubleday)
• Short Stories, 1962 (introd. by Louis B. Salomon)
• The Complete Greek Stories: from the Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, 1963 (illustrated by Harold Jones, with a foreword by Kathleen Lines and a postscript by Roger Lancelyn Green)
• Hawthorne in England: Selections from Our Old Home and the English Notebooks, 1965 (edited by Cushing Strout)
• Selected Short Stories, 1966 (edited with an introd. by Alfred Kazin)
• Poems, 1967 (edited by Richard E. Peck)
• Great Short Works, 1967 (edited, with an introd., by Frederick C. Crews)
• Pandora's Box: The Paradise of Children, 1967 (illustrated by Paul Galdone)
• The Birthmark and Other Stories, 1968 (edited by Maxine Greene)
• Great Writings, 1971 (selected by L. James Morgan, Jr.)
• Love letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1839-1863, 1972 (2 vols., foreword by C. E. Frazer Clark, Jr.)
• The American Claimant Manuscripts, 1977  (edited by Edward H. Davidson, Claude M. Simpson, L. Neal Smith)
• The Elixir of Life Manuscripts, 1977 (edited by Edward H. Davidson, Claude M. Simpson, L. Neal Smith)
• Hawthorne's Lost Notebook, 1835-1841, 1978 (transcript and pref. by Barbara S. Mouffe; introd. by Hyatt H. Waggoner; foreword by Charles Ryskamp)
• The French and Italian Notebooks, 1980 (edited by Thomas Woodson)
• The Letters, 1984-1987 (4 vols., edited by Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, Norman Holmes Pearson)
• Rappaccini's Daughter: Chamber Opera in One Act. 1985 (composed by Sam Dennison; revised and edited by Georgia Marshall; libretto adapted by Karen Campbell from the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales, 1987 (selected and edited by James McIntosh)
• Selected Tales and Sketches, 1987 (selected and with an introduction by Michael J. Colacurcio)
• Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales, 1987 (edited with an introduction by Brian Harding)
• The Consular Letters, 1988 (2 vols., edited by Bill Ellis)
• Hawthorne's American Travel Sketches, 1989 (edited by Alfred Weber, Beth L. Lueck, Dennis Berthold)
• The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1993- (edited by Norman Holmes Pearson)
• Miscellaneous Prose and Verse, 1994 (edited by Thomas Woodson, Claude M. Simpson, L. Neal Smith)
• The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1994 (illustrated by Lori & David Deitrick)
• The English Notebooks, 1997 (edited by Thomas Woodson, Bill Ellis)
• Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 2002 (edited by Joel Myerson)
• Ordinary Mysteries: The Common Journal of Nathaniel And Sophia Hawthorne, 1842-1843, 2005 (edited by Joel Myerson)
• The Portable Hawthorne, 2005 (edited with an introduction by William C. Spengemann)
• The Business of Reflection: Hawthorne in His Notebooks, 2009 (edited by Robert Milder and Randall Fuller)
• Selected Stories, 2011 (selected and introduction by Brenda Wineapple)
• The House of the Seven Gables: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, 2017 (second edition; edited by Robert S. Levine)
  
• The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, 2020 (with an introduction by Douglas Wilson)
  
• The Scarlet Letter, 2022 (edited by Kurt Lovelace; Sheridan: Pierian Springs Press)
  
• The Scarlet Letter, 2024 (New York: Dover Publications)