Scarlet Letter and Other Writings

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. Leland S. Person is Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. He previously taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and Indiana University, Fort Wayne. His is the author of Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity, Aesthetic Headaches: Women and Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorn, and many articles on nineteenth-century American writers, especially Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Henry James, and James Fenimore Cooper. He recently coedited (with Robert K. Martin) a collection of essays, Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy.