The Scarlet Letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne (Full Version)

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Overview

The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, is an American novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and is generally considered to be his magnum opus. Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who gives birth after committing adultery, refuses to name the father, and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity.
Throughout the novel, Hawthorne explores questions of grace, legalism, sin and guilt.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013723887
Publisher:	RoundTable Books
Publication date:	01/06/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	710 KB

About the Author

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem,
Massachusetts, where his birthplace is now a museum. William
Hathorne, who emigrated from England in 1630, was the first of
Hawthorne's ancestors to arrive in the colonies. After arriving,
William persecuted Quakers. William's son John Hathorne was one of
the judges who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials. (One theory is that
having learned about this, the author added the "w" to his surname
in his early twenties, shortly after graduating from college.)
Hawthorne's father, Nathaniel Hathorne, Sr., was a sea captain who
died in 1808 of yellow fever, when Hawthorne was only four years
old, in Raymond, Maine. Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College at the
expense of an uncle from 1821 to 1824, befriending classmates Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce. While
there he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Until the
publication of his Twice-Told Tales in 1837, Hawthorne wrote in the
comparative obscurity of what he called his "owl's nest" in the
family home. As he looked back on this period of his life, he
wrote: "I have not lived, but only dreamed about living." And yet
it was this period of brooding and writing that had formed, as
Malcolm Cowley was to describe it, "the central fact in Hawthorne's
career," his "term of apprenticeship" that would eventually result
in the "richly meditated fiction." Hawthorne was hired in 1839 as a
weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House. He had become
engaged in the previous year to the illustrator and
transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. Seeking a possible home for
himself and Sophia, he joined the transcendentalist utopian
community at Brook Farm in 1841; later that year, however, he left
when he became dissatisfied with farming and the experiment. (His
Brook Farm adventure would prove an inspiration for his novel The
Blithedale Romance.) He married Sophia in 1842; they moved to The
Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where they lived for three
years. There he wrote most of the tales collected in Mosses from an
Old Manse. Hawthorne and his wife then moved to Salem and later to
the Berkshires, returning in 1852 to Concord and a new home The
Wayside, previously owned by the Alcotts. Their neighbors in
Concord included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Date of Birth:

July 4, 1804

Date of Death:

May 19, 1864

Place of Birth:

Salem, Massachusetts

Place of Death:

Plymouth, New Hampshire

Education:

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, 1824