Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was descended from a judge at the Salem witch trials, and the guilt of the Puritan past was his subject. He lived for twelve years in his mother’s house in Salem writing tales, worked at the custom house, and in 1850 published The Scarlet Letter, the story of Hester Prynne, her daughter, her lover the minister and her husband the physician, in the Boston of the 1640s. Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to him; Pierce, a college friend, made him consul at Liverpool. He wrote of the American conscience with a darkness that Emerson’s Concord, where he also lived, did not share.