In the habit of seeing meanings in everything, he thought in symbols and wrote in symbols which often are so commonplace and natural as to escape notice. Melville in his own time and Henry James and William Faulkner later are among the authors who have been influenced by Hawthorne, particularly by his symbolic method and his attention to the dark elements in human experience. Through both direct statement and example, he helped define for his age the literary sketch, the tale, and long fiction which fuses romance and psychological realism.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, where his paternal ancestors had been prominent since the founding generation. (In England and America the family name had been spelled both with and without w; the novelist first spelled it with w about 1827.) When he began writing fiction, he was drawn into a search for material in the careers of his early ancestors and in the history of colonial New England. The first American ancestor, William Hathorne (1606"-1681), who pronounced sentence on early Quakers, is reflected in the tale "The Gentle Boy." The role of his son, John (1641-1717), as a magistrate during the witch trials of 1692 contributed to a number of Hawthorne's works which include the lore of witchcraft, the idea of a hereditary curse, and the effect of one generation on another.
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