1. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804-1864 “Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” Source: Peabody Essex Museum

2. Short Biography Born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, to a wealthy and prominent family. At four years old, father, a sailor, died on a voyage in Surinam, Dutch Guinea. Maternal relatives recognized his literary talent and financed his education at Bowdoin College. Classmates were many of the important literary and political figures of the day: writer Horatio Bridge, future Senator Jonathan Ciley, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and future President Franklin Pierce, who all supplied Hawthorne with government employment in the lean times, allowing him time to bloom as an author. In July, 1842, Hawthorne married Sophia and moved his grandparents’ home in Concord where he contentedly gardened, ice-skated with Emerson, and rowed with Thoreau. In 1849, anguished by his mother’s death and the loss of a government job, he wrote The Scarlet Letter—his first novel and his masterpiece. After his third child, Rose, was born in Lenox in 1851, he bought his first and only house in Concord. Hawthorne was appointed Consul to Liverpool, England, serving from 1853 to 1857. From 1857 to 1859, he lived in Rome and Florence, where his immersion in art and acquaintance with artists generated the last romance he would complete— The Marble Faun. Died on May 19, 1864.

3. Major Themes in Hawthorne’s Works Alienation Problem of Guilt -a character's sense of guilt forced by the puritanical heritage or by society; also guilt vs. innocence. Pride - Hawthorne treats pride as evil. Individual vs. society Self-fulfillment vs. accommodation or frustration, Hypocrisy vs. integrity Love vs. hate Exploitation vs. hurting Fate vs. free will.

4. Major Works Mrs. Hutchinson (1830) My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832) Young Goodman Brown (1835) The Birth-mark (1843) Rappaccini's Daughter (1844) The Scarlet Letter (1849) Preface to The House of Seven Gables (1860) The Minister's Black Veil (1860)