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Nathaniel Hawthorne

1804–1864 · 60 years Tier II

A customs clerk who wrote through every layoff and patronage job

Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne — Mathew Benjamin Brady — 1860 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Hawthorne's father was a sea captain who died of yellow fever in Dutch Suriname in 1808, when the boy was four. He grew up in Salem under the weight of an ancestor, John Hathorne, a magistrate who had sent people to the gallows in the witch trials — a lineage he found so shaming that in his twenties he added a w to the family name. Bowdoin College took him at 16, and there he became friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a mediocre classmate named Franklin Pierce. His first novel, Fanshawe, cost him 100 dollars of his own money to print in 1828, sold almost nothing, and embarrassed him enough that he spent years afterward trying to keep anyone from reading it.

He supported himself for two decades on political patronage rather than his fiction: weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House from 1839, a paying stake in the utopian commune at Brook Farm in 1841, then surveyor of the Salem Custom House from 1846 until the Whigs turned him out after the 1848 election. The dismissal made him briefly famous before the fiction did. The Scarlet Letter, written that same furious year, appeared in March 1850 and sold out its first printing in ten days, though it earned him only 1,500 dollars over the next fourteen years. The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance followed within two years. When Pierce won the presidency in 1852, he rewarded his biographer with the consulship at Liverpool, the most lucrative posting the foreign service had.

The patronage jobs came at a cost to more than his writing time. In 1852 he wrote Franklin Pierce's campaign biography and used it to assure voters that slavery would eventually just vanish like a dream and could not be remedied by human contrivances — a line that gave a Democratic candidate cover on the era's defining question in exchange for a consulship. Abolitionist acquaintances were disgusted, and he did not seem to mind. His income depended for twenty years on exactly the kind of political spoils system his fiction never addressed: two custom house salaries and a foreign consulship, secured through friendship and party loyalty, sustained the household in years his books did not.

He died in his sleep at Plymouth, New Hampshire, on May 19, 1864, on a recuperative trip with Pierce. His son Julian, a Harvard freshman, learned of it the next day while being blindfolded and put in a coffin as part of a fraternity initiation. Longfellow, Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes carried the casket to Authors' Ridge in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Melville had already written that this Hawthorne dropped germinous seeds into his soul, and Poe called him a genius outright. His wife and daughter, buried in England, were moved to the plot beside him only in 2006. Harold Bloom later placed him alongside Melville, James and Faulkner as the essential American novelists.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Nathaniel Hawthorne's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Fanshawe book
Self-published for 100 dollars, and later disowned 1828
Twice-Told Tales book
The story collection that made his reputation 1837
The Scarlet Letter book
Written in the months after losing the Salem surveyorship 1850
The House of the Seven Gables book 1851
The Blithedale Romance book
Drawn from his time at Brook Farm 1852
Life of Franklin Pierce book
A campaign biography, written for a friend running for president 1852

Life in brief

with age at each point

1808 aged ~4 His father dies of yellow fever in Dutch Suriname Hawthorne was four.
1825 aged ~21 Graduates from Bowdoin College Classmates included Longfellow and Franklin Pierce.
1828 aged ~24 Self-publishes Fanshawe, then tries to suppress it
January 17, 1839 aged 34 Takes the weigher and gauger post at the Boston Custom House
July 9, 1842 aged 38 Marries Sophia Peabody
April 1846 aged 41 Becomes surveyor of the Salem Custom House Lost the post after the 1848 election.
March 1850 aged 45 The Scarlet Letter is published
1852 aged ~48 Writes Franklin Pierce's campaign biography Rewarded with the U.S. consulship at Liverpool.
May 19, 1864 aged 59 Dies in his sleep at Plymouth, New Hampshire On a recuperative trip with Franklin Pierce.