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 this country of the privately-admired and publicly-unappreciated man of genius." Although Hawthorne would become known as the father of the American novel and accepted as part of the canon of American literature, he lived a difficult life. Paid as little as $25 per short story, Hawthorne was forced to seek out a living as a surveyor for a time, only to lose the position to political patronage. His scandalous (at the time) book, The Scarlet Letter, may have given him some degree of celebrity status, but the book earned him only $1,500 from the American edition in his lifetime.

Yet Hawthorne persevered; his dimly lit peephole vision of the world may...