Nathaniel Hawthorne Influences

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on the 4th of July 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts; a town still haunted by the history of its horrific witch trials. Despite Hawthorne’s desires he was unable to erase his family's actions in regards to the public woman of a Quaker women. His earliest American ancestor, William Hathorne, was the magistrate who had ordered this sentence on the woman – he defended this brutal attack on the basis that he was a strict defender of Puritan orthodoxy. William’s son, John Hathorne, was also a factor of the horrific past of the Hathorne’s, as he was one of three judges in the Salem Witchcraft Trials. Still affected by the immense shame of this event, Nathaniel Hawthorne added the ‘w’ into his last name when he began writing

His mother, Elizabeth Clarke Manning, raised him (as well as his two sisters) in a relatively secluded lifestyle with the help of her affluent brothers. At the age of seventeen Nathaniel Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Despite the will of society, Hawthorne spent almost a dozen years, after his graduation in 1824, reading and writing in an attempt to perfect the art of writing fiction.

During this experimental time period Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote ‘Fanshawe’ – a novel that he deemed amateur in style and attempted to remove and destroy all copies of it. However this did not quell Hawthorne’s desire to write and eventually he found his own tone, voice, and style of literature. He produced and published many impressive stories such as: ‘The Hollow of the Three Hills’, ‘An Old Woman’s Tale’, ‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’, and ‘Young Goodman Brown’. By 1837 Nathaniel Hawthorne had written enough short ‘tales’ (as he preferred to call them) to form a collection, which he titled ‘Twice-Told

However, three years later, with the election of Zachary Taylor as president of the United States, Hawthorne lost his job. This greatly affected Hawthorne in the form of bitterness, and as a response he wrote ‘The Custom House’– an essay that prefaced his most successful novel: ‘The Scarlet Letter’. After this, Nathaniel Hawthorne became determined to leave Salem – and his past there. The Hawthorne’s moved to Lenox, Massachusetts where Nathaniel spent a majority of his time writing tales and novels – including ‘The House of Seven Gables’. Near the end of 1851 Nathaniel Hawthorne moved his family to a town closer to Boston – West Newton where he quickly wrote ‘The Blithedale Romance’. After this, the ever-nomadic Hawthorne family moved again to Concord. Then in 1853 Nathaniel Hawthorne was award a consulship in Liverpool, Lancashire – a position that would provide him and his family a form of financial