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Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown"

BIOGRAPHY

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[From The Norton Introduction to Literature]

(1804–1864)

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of Puritan immigrants.Educated at Bowdoin College, he was agonizingly slow in winning recognition for his work, and supported himself from time to time in government service—working in the customhouses of Boston and Salem and serving as the United States consul in Liverpool.His early collections of stories, Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), did not sell well, and it was not until the publication of his most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), that his fame spread beyond a discerning few. His other novels include The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852). Burdened by a deep sense of guilt for his family's role in the notorious Salem witchcraft trials over a century before he was born (one ancestor had been a judge), Hawthorne used fiction as a means of exploring the moral dimensions of sin and the human soul.

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