Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on 4 July 1804. One of his ancestors, John Hathorne, was a judge at the Salem witch trials of 1692, and Hawthorne seems to have felt that inheritance as a weight. He added the “w” to the family name as a young man, and guilt passed down through generations runs all through his work. His father, a sea captain, died when Nathaniel was four. He went to Bowdoin College in Maine, where his classmates included the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the future president Franklin Pierce.

After graduating in 1825 he went home to Salem and spent about twelve years writing in relative seclusion, publishing tales anonymously in magazines and annuals. The best of them were collected in Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). He married Sophia Peabody in 1842 and worked, unhappily, at the Boston and Salem custom houses to support his family. Losing the Salem job in 1849 gave him time to write The Scarlet Letter (1850), which made him famous. The House of the Seven Gables followed in 1851. Pierce appointed him United States consul in Liverpool, and he lived in England and Italy for several years before returning home. He died on 19 May 1864, during a trip in New Hampshire with Pierce.

Hawthorne called his longer works “romances” rather than novels, meaning that he claimed the right to mix the real with the strange. His short fiction does this constantly. Each of the four stories here turns on a single, almost allegorical image. In Young Goodman Brown it is a forest meeting outside Salem village; in The Minister's Black Veil, a piece of crape; in The Birth-Mark, a small red hand on a woman’s cheek; and in Rappaccini's Daughter, a poisonous garden in Padua. He never fully explains these images, and they are more disturbing for it.

Poe reviewed Twice-Told Tales in 1842, and it was there that he set out his famous theory of the single effect. “Young Goodman Brown” is the place to start, and the one that will stay with you longest.