Julian Hawthorne (June 22, 1846-1934) followed in the footsteps of his father, the famous novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and became a prolific American author and journalist. He wrote numerous poems, novels, short stories, mystery/detective fiction, essays, travel books, biographies and histories. As a journalist he reported on the Indian Famine for Cosmopolitan magazine, and the Spanish-American War for the New York Journal. He was born in Boston, and entered Harvard in 1863, but did not graduate. He studied civil engineering in America and Germany, was engineer in the New York City Dock Department under General McClellan (1870-72), spent 10 years abroad, and on his return edited his father's unfinished Dr. Grimshawe's Secret (1883). While in Europe he wrote the novels: Bressant (1873); Idolatry (1874); Garth (1874); Archibald Malmaison (1879); and Sebastian Strome (1880). He wrote many novels after his return. In 1889 there were reports that Hawthorne was one of several writers who had, under the name of "Arthur Richmond," published in the North American Review devastating attacks on President Grover Cleveland and other leading Americans. Hawthorne denied the reports. In 1908, Hawthorne’s old Harvard friend William J. Morton (son of pioneer anesthesiologist William T.G. Morton) invited Hawthorne to join in promoting some newly created mining companies in Ontario, Canada. Hawthorne made his writing and his family name central to the stock-selling campaigns. After complaints from shareholders, both Morton and Hawthorne were tried in New York City for mail fraud, and convicted in 1913. They each served less than a year in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.[1] Upon his release from prison, he wrote The Subterranean Brotherhood (1914), a nonfiction work calling for an immediate end to incarceration of criminals. Hawthorne argued, based on his own experience, that incarceration was inhumane, and should be replaced by moral suasion. Of his own mail fraud conviction, he always maintained his innocence.
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Hawthorne also wrote a critique of his father's novel The Scarlet Letter that was published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1886.
References
Dan Plazak – A Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top ISBN 978-0-87480-840-7 (includes a chapter on Julian Hawthorne, concentrating on his mine promotion activities)
- This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.
