When "The Minister's Black Veil" was first published in the periodical the Token in 1836, America was still a relatively new country struggling to form a national identity distinct from that of England. Americans no longer needed to channel all of their energies into survival; they now had the freedom to engage in and develop a whole host of cultural activities.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had long been exhorting the American public to cultivate its own unique identity. For example, in "Self-Reliance," he says, "Insist on yourself; never imitate." Many Americans were upset that so many people in the fledgling United States still looked to England for examples of great literature and dismissed American literary efforts as inferior. Evert Augustus Duyckinck, editor of a journal that published some of Hawthorne's early work, laments this state of literary affairs. He writes in an 1841 issue of his journal Arcturus, "In...