Nathaniel Hawthorne Influences

American literature is anything that is written or spoken in America that has a standing influence. The most influential American literature writers must not only be born in American, but their work should show how America has influenced them. They should also write in languages associated with America and still continue to influence the world today. Thus, the single most important writer of American literature should portray each of these characteristics. The one person who comes to mind that properly fits this description is Nathaniel Hawthorne. This writer, who the Norton Anthology considers to be the “most significant fiction writer of the antebellum period”, appropriately fits the characteristics of who I would consider the most important

He enjoyed reading many of the works of British novelists Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollet, William Godwin, and Sir Walter Scott (370) As he grew up to become a novelist himself it was known that he “dreamed of becoming an American Scott”, showing how influenced he was by Scott’s historical novels (9). Moreover, Hawthorne was inspired by the success of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book (26). There are also many possibilities that he was influenced by Poe as much as he influenced the poet himself, due to the connections between the two’s stories (19). However, it is apparent that the thing that affected him the most was his family’s history in the Puritan Salem, Massachusetts. This can be seen in his novel The Scarlet Letter, which is set in Boston during Puritan times (371). This history plays in part with the influence and making of not only his ethnicity, but also the genre, geography, and language of his

Moreover, after finding papers on a woman who lived during in the Puritan time period, Hawthorne began to write the story of Hester Prynne, a story which led him to becoming a well-known novelist, in both the United States and Great Britain, who was “celebrated for his brilliant prose style and uncanny ability to recreate the past” (371). The story was written in a dialect associated with those of Old England known commonly as old English, as can first be seen in the beginning of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter when a person uses the word “ye” instead of you (478). Moreover, Hawthorne claimed that the novel was authentic, making it a sort of historical novel (469). It is apparent that he might have been aiming to write the same type of novels as his inspiration, Sir Walter Scott, who was known for writing historical novels(9). However, as seen in many of his other works, the story had an aura of science fiction to it near the end when an A appears on Dimmesdale’s chest, and so it can be concluded that Hawthorne was a prose novelist who wrote mostly historical fiction based in America