Nathaniel Hawthorne is the 19th century American novelist who gave us such classics as The House of Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter, and The Marble Faun. His own New England, Puritan forbears provided the grist for the mill of his writing themes: we are born of sin, live in guilt, and pay through punishment and repentance. The abiding climate of intolerance and religious fervor contributed to the dark demises of his major characters, but not without his shedding complex psychological light upon their motivations. Hester Prynne, for example, stands out as an early example of a feminist who abides by her own principles. Nominally a Transcendentalist, in the company of the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Amos Bronson Alcott, Hawthorne nonetheless did not trust the abilities of artistic intellectuals. By all measures, Hawthorne seems to have led a relatively happy life, with a good, solid marriage to Sophia Peabody and as the father of three healthy children. He was successful at his chosen work and even served President Franklin Pierce as a United States consul in Liverpool, England. He died in 1864, at what we would call a young age – sixty – but continues to hold his exalted place in literary history through the ages.
