House of the Seven Gables

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE was four years old when his father, a sea captain, died in 1808. He grew up under the roof of his maternal uncles in Salem, Massachusetts, and attended Bowdoin College in Maine, where he discovered his vocation as a writer. The publication of his short story “Young Goodman Brown” in 1835 was followed by the collections Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846). The latter took its name from the house in Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Sophia, lived after their marriage in 1842. Unable to earn a living from his writing, he sought employment as a government bureaucrat, first in the Salem Custom House and later as United States consul in Liverpool, England. Despite his chronic financial insecurity, he continued to produce such notable works as The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). He died in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in 1864. Robert S. Levine (Ph.D. Stanford; General Editor and Editor, 1820–1865) is Distinguished University Professor of English and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville; Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity; Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism; The Lives of Frederick Douglas; Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies; and (upcoming from Norton) The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. He has edited a number of books, including The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville and Norton Critical Editions of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and Melville’s Pierre. Levine has received fellowships from the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2014 the American Literature Section of the MLA awarded him the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies.