Author Nathaniel Hawthorne

 

If there’s one thing Nathaniel Hawthorne understood, it was sin. Not just the kind you confess on Sundays, but the deep, gut-wrenching, life-ruining kind that haunts generations. Maybe that’s because he had his own ghosts rattling in the family closet.

His great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the Salem witch trial judges who sent people to the gallows without so much as a blink. That little piece of family history must have gnawed at Hawthorne because he spent his entire career wrestling with Puritan guilt. His father died when he was a kid, and Nathaniel grew up under the shadow of a somber, widowed mother. He went to Bowdoin College in Maine, rubbing elbows with future president Franklin Pierce and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. After graduation he holed up in his mom’s attic for a decade, writing stories no one read and living an isolated existence.

Then came The Scarlet Letter (1850), the book that turned his brooding into literary gold. If you think high schoolers complain about it now, imagine how it hit in the 1850s—scandalous, biting, and loaded with more moral dilemmas than a Sunday sermon. The story of Hester Prynne, forced to wear the infamous “A” for adultery while her hypocritical lover, Dimmesdale, wastes away with guilt, was a brutal slap to the face of the Puritan past. The book made Hawthorne famous, but he still had to take government jobs to pay the bills.

He followed it up with The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a gothic masterpiece steeped in curses and family secrets, and The Blithedale Romance (1852), inspired by his time at Brook Farm

When Franklin Pierce became president in 1853, he rewarded Hawthorne with a cushy job as U.S. consul in Liverpool. By the time he returned to the United States, the Civil War was brewing, and Hawthorne didn’t quite know where he fit in.

His death in 1864 was sudden, almost suspiciously so. He’d been in poor health, but his decline was fast. Some say he was poisoned, others that he just wasted away. Either way, Hawthorne died in his sleep on a trip with Pierce, leaving behind a legacy of tortured characters, moral reckoning, and the ultimate literary mic drop on Puritan hypocrisy.

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