Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1986) was a prolific American writer. He is most known for his novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: BiographyAuthor Nathaniel Hawthorne is best known for his novels 'The Scarlet Letter' and 'The House of Seven Gables,' and also wrote many short stories.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: BritannicaNathaniel Hawthorne, (born July 4, 1804, Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.—died May 19, 1864, Plymouth, New Hampshire), American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale. One of the greatest fiction writers in American literature, he is best known for The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Poetry FoundationNew England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, where his paternal ancestors had been prominent since the founding generation (who then spelled their last name Hathorn).
Research & Reference
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel: American National BiographyAmerican National Biography on Nathaniel Hawthorne.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Nathaniel Hawthorne. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
Streaming Media
- The Hawthorne Legacy - The Scarlet LetterABOUT THE AUTHOR: The Hawthorne Legacy completes an overview of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life (1804-1864) and selected works published in nineteenth century American literature. Amongst his many novels, The Scarlet Letter which still reflects the moral and ethical dilemmas men and women face today, is explored in depth.
- Nathaniel HawthorneFor many, The Scarlet Letter represents the pinnacle of 19th-century literature. In this program, three leading Hawthorne scholars use the novel and several Hawthorne short stories to explore issues of interpretation and literary analysis. Each work is discussed in relation to American culture and political events. Significant details of Hawthorne’s life are also illuminated. Experts include Millicent Bell, a leading Hawthorne scholar; Professor Larry Reynolds, president of the Hawthorne Society; and Professor Brenda Wineapple, author of a biography on Hawthorne.
- The Scarlet LetterAn epic adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel about morality, justice, love and faith as Hester Prynne bears the scarlet letter “A” for refusing to reveal the name of her lover and father of her illegitimate child.
Author's Works & Perspectives
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels (LOA #10)
Written in a richly suggestive style, Hawthorne's five world-famous novels are permeated by his own history as well as America's In The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to his ancestor's involvement in the Salem witch trials, as he follows the fortunes of two rival families, the Maules and the Pyncheons. The novel moves across 150 years of American history, from an ancestral crime condoned by Puritan theocracy to reconciliation and a new beginning in the bustling Jacksonian era. Considered Hawthorne's greatest work, The Scarlet Letter is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. The transgression of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, the innate lawlessness of their bastard child Pearl, and the torturous jealousy of the husband Roger Chillingworth eventually erupt through the stern reserve of Puritan Boston. The Scarlet Letter engages the moral and romantic imagination of readers who ponder the question of sexual freedom and its place in the social world. Fanshawe is an engrossing apprentice work that Hawthorne published anonymously and later sought to suppress. Written during his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, it is a tragic romance of an ascetic scholar's love for a merchant's daughter. The Blithedale Romance is a novel about the perils, which Hawthorne knew first-hand, of living in a utopian community. The utilitarian reformer Hollingsworth, the reticent narrator Miles Coverdale, the unearthly Priscilla, and the sensuous Zenobia (purportedly modeled on Margaret Fuller) act out a drama of love and rejection, idealism and chicanery, millennial hope and suicidal despair on an experimental commune in rural Massachusetts. The Marble Faun, Hawthorne's last finished novel, uses Italian landscapes where sunlight gives way to mythological shadings as a background for mysteries of identity and murder. Its two young Americans, Kenyon and Hilda, become caught up in the disastrous passion of Donatello, an ingenuous nobleman, for the beautiful, mysterious Miriam, a woman trying to escape her past.
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel brings to life the attitudes and passions of 17th century New England. Condemned by her Puritan fellows for having a child out of wedlock, Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet letter.
The Blithedale Romance
The selection of "Backgrounds and Sources" focuses on Hawthorne's visit to Brook Farm in 1841, as reported in his letters and The American Notebooks, as well as on other experiences and observations which find expression in the novel.The essays in "Criticism" include fifteen "Contemporary Reviews" that locate the problems of the novel pursued by later critics in a more detailed and sophisticated fashion."Modern Essays in Criticism" represent the perspec-tives of Irving Howe, Roy R. Male, A. N. Kaul, Leo B. Levy, Hans-Joachim Lang, Philip Rahv, Allan B. Lefcowitz, Barbara F. Lefcowitz, Nina Baym, Hyatt H. Waggoner, Frederick C. Crews, Kelley Griffith, Jr., Louis Auchincloss, James H. Justus, and Kent Bales.
Tanglewood Tales
A fantastic collection of classic ancient Greek myths retold for children, such as Theseus and the Minotaur and Jason and the Golden Fleece.
True Stories of History and Biography
The whole history of grandfather's chair. Complete in three parts -- Biographical stories: Benjamin West. Sir Isaac Newton. Samuel Johnson. Oliver Cromwell. Benjamin Franklin. Queen Christina.
Practicing Romance
Practicing Romance sets out to re-tell the story of Hawthorne's career, arguing that he is best understood as a cultural analyst of extraordinary acuity, ambitious to reshape--in a sense to cure--the community he addresses. Through readings attentive to narrative strategy and alert to the emerging middle-class culture that was his audience, the book defines and describes Hawthornian Romance in a new way: not, in customary fashion, as the definitive instance of a peculiarly American genre, but as a narrative practice designed to expose and restage the covert drama that affiliates us to our community. Hawthorne's fiction thus recovers for its readers, through the interpretive independence it teaches, a freer, more lucid, more critical relation to the community we inhabit, and the cultural engagement romance enacts in turn rescues Hawthorne from the confining marginality that the writer's career had threatened to confer. From the book's distinctive account of his narrative tactics, especially his deployment of the voices and attitudes--authoritarian or democratic, entrapping or freeing--that give shape to his ideological terrain, Hawthorne emerges as a daring reinventor of the novel's cultural role. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.