Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804. His family, originally English-born, went back five generations and this genealogy was to have a major impact on the subject matter and settings for many of his novels.

For example, one of his ancestors, a judge who sat on the Salem witch trials of the early 1600s, served as inspiration for a character in his novel, The House of the Seven Gables. Indeed many of his works are set in this locale and era, Puritan New England, including his greatest one, The Scarlet Letter (1850). This deals with guilt, fervor, hypocrisy and concupiscence in a rigid Puritan social structure. This novel as many of Hawthorne’s is grim, but he employs irony and ambiguity and remote setting and point-of-view distancing to offset this grimness without losing any intensity. It was a revolutionary American allegory of America.

Other works include The Blithedale Romance (an interesting portrait of a utopian experiment) and The Marble Faun, which is set in Rome. This last were later in his career and were not entirely successful. Others include Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse.

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote some of the greatest fiction in American literature. One reason for this is his psychological acuity and his emphasis on the darker side of human nature, depth psychology, and, like Melville, the nature of evil. His seasoned treatment of such subjects is exemplary of this.

Hawthorne died in 1864 at the age of sixty.