His greatest short stories, as well as his masterpiece novel “The scarlet letter“, are marked by a deep psychological and moral insight rarely equaled and never surpassed by any American writer. This is also described by the Encyclopedia Britannica. Nathaniel Hawthorne, tells the story of two lovers separated by fate, tells us of their personal strengths and weaknesses intertwined with each other, and of the interpretation of the “moral law” of the community of Puritan America, until the moment when death unites them in a single tombstone.
Born in Salem, Massachusetts on July 4, 1804, Nathaniel Hawthorne He grew up in a deeply puritan family, so much so that among his ancestors there was a judge, John Hawthorne, who had participated in the witch-hunting processes. Fatherless at four years old, Nathaniel He grew up with his mother and sister Elizabeth. Intelligent and dynamic, he studied at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, graduating in 1825 and meeting Franklin Pierce, the future (fourteenth) president of the United States.
After studying he began to work in Boston Customs (1839-1841) and then in the transcendentalist community of Brook Farm, from which he soon separated because he did not agree with the vague and conformist idealism that characterized his colleagues. In 1842 he married Sophia Peabody and settled in Concord, close to very great writers like Emerson and Thoreau, whom he frequented despite the ideological incompatibility that divided them. Named a Salem Customs Inspector, due to political changes, he left his job after only two years.
It is in this period that Hawthorne wrote “The scarlet letter“, in the introduction of which he claims to have” stolen “the inspiration from a document discovered in the Salem Customs archives.
Hawthorne He returned to Concord in 1852 and published the official biography of Franklin Pierce, the Democratic presidential candidate. In the last years of his life he worked on novels, which remained unfinished and were published posthumously: “Septimius Felton“(1872),”The novel Dolliver and other stories“(1876),”Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret“(1883).
Old and tired, he returned to the US, where his life was disrupted by the new reality of the abolitionist movement and the Civil War, as well as family misfortunes. Nathaniel Hawthorne died mysteriously in Plymouth (New Hampshire), May 19, 1864.