Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, the second of three children born to Nathaniel and Elizabeth Hawthorne. (Their son added the "w" to the family name when he began his writing career.) In 1808, his father, a ship's captain, died of yellow fever in the distant port of Surinam. Shortly thereafter, four-year-old Nathaniel moved with his mother and two sisters, Elizabeth and Maria Louisa, from their home on Union Street to the house next door belonging to the Mannings, his mother's family. In the Manning household, Hawthorne's keen intelligence was noted and nurtured; in fact, his maternal relatives hoped that he would eventually attend college. At the age of sixteen, Hawthorne demonstrated a flair for journalism when he wrote and printed the Spectator - an intra-family newsletter he wrote with his sister that functioned as a kind of correspondence between the Mannings in Salem...