Life & Background
Hawthorne was born in Salem in 1804 into an old New England family; his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne had been a judge at the witch trials, and Hawthorne is thought to have added the w to the family name to distance himself from it. His father, a sea captain, died when he was four. After college at Bowdoin he spent a dozen obscure years in his mother's house writing stories, burning his first novel. He worked at the Boston Custom House, lived briefly at the utopian Brook Farm community, and married Sophia Peabody in 1842. Dismissed from the Salem Custom House in 1849 when the administration changed, he wrote The Scarlet Letter in a few months. His friendship with Melville, who dedicated Moby-Dick to him, belongs to these years. A consulship in Liverpool and years in Italy followed; he died in 1864.
The Scarlet Letter
In seventeenth-century Boston, Hester Prynne is led from prison with an infant in her arms and a scarlet A on her dress, sentenced for adultery and refusing to name the father. Her husband, long missing and presumed dead, arrives in the crowd and takes the name Roger Chillingworth, extracting from her a promise of silence about his identity. Hester lives at the edge of the settlement, supporting herself and her daughter Pearl by needlework. The father is Arthur Dimmesdale, the young minister, whose concealed guilt destroys his health while Chillingworth, having attached himself as physician, feeds on the discovery. Hester proposes flight; Dimmesdale instead confesses on the scaffold before the town and dies. Chillingworth, deprived of his revenge, wastes away. Hester returns years later and resumes the letter voluntarily.
Hawthorne called his books romances rather than novels, claiming latitude for the marvellous and the symbolic, and the letter itself is the technique in miniature: it is punishment, art object, and shifting sign, meaning adulteress, able, and finally something the narrator refuses to fix. His method of multiple choice — offering several explanations for an event and endorsing none — keeps the supernatural available without asserting it. The Custom House preface frames the whole as a found manuscript, distancing the author from his own Puritan inheritance while confessing it. Modern criticism has focused on Hester as a proto-feminist figure whose radicalism the ending contains, and on the novel's treatment of shame as a public technology.
Why Hawthorne Matters
The Scarlet Letter is the first great American novel and the founding text of a line running through Melville, James, and Faulkner that treats guilt, ancestry, and hidden sin as national subjects. Hawthorne's theory of the romance shaped how American fiction defined itself against the English social novel, an argument later formalised by Richard Chase. His short stories — Young Goodman Brown, The Minister's Black Veil, Rappaccini's Daughter — are standard on syllabi in their own right.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Twice-Told Tales1837
- Mosses from an Old Manse1846
- The Scarlet Letter1850
- The House of the Seven Gables1851
- The Blithedale Romance1852
- The Marble Faun1860