Although Nathaniel Hawthorne called himself "the obscurest man in American letters," his achievements in fiction, both as short-story writer and novelist, offer models fashioned too well for contemporary and later writers to ignore. Even though fame...

When Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on our most patriotic holiday in 1804, his ancestral roots were already deeply planted in New England. Writing in The Scarlet Letter (1850) of his sentimental affection for the town of his...

In sketches, tales, and romances published in the second third of the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne chose mainly American materials, drawing especially on the history of colonial New England and his native Salem in the time of his early...

In sketches, tales, and romances published in the second third of the nineteenth century, Hawthorne chose mainly American materials, drawing especially on the history of colonial New England and his native Salem in the time of his early American...

On 9 July 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody were married in a simple ceremony that capped a courtship of nearly five years. Thus Hawthorne, at the age of thirty-eight, assumed his role as head of a domestic circle that grew to include three...

Nathaniel Hawthorne was fond of calling himself the "obscurist man of letters in America." Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe, with whom Hawthorne basically created the short story form in America, once said that Hawthorne was "the example, par excellence, in...

The work of American fiction writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was based on the history of his Puritan ancestors and the New England of his own day but, in its "power of blackness," has universal significance. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in...