Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) American, Twice Told Tales Printed 1911. Originally published in 1837, this is the Everyman's Library Edition, red hardcover with gold detailing. 

Size: 4 1/2 x 7 x 7/8 in. 

#3104 #8 . 

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on the 4th of July, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. His great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the judges who oversaw the Salem witch trials, and Hawthorne added the “w” to his surname in his early twenties in an effort to dissociate himself from his notorious forebears. Hawthorne’s uncle Robert Manning gave him the financial support to attend Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in 1821. There Hawthorne became close friends with future president Franklin Pierce, as well as attending classes with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future naval reformer Horatio Bridge. He graduated with the class of 1825, and his first published work, “Fanshawe: A Tale,” appeared anonymously in October 1828, printed at the author’s own expense of $100. Although it received generally positive reviews, it did not sell well. He published several minor pieces in the Salem Gazette, before serving as the editor of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in 1836. At the time, he boarded with poet Thomas Green Fessenden on Hancock Street in Beacon Hill in Boston, and was offered an appointment as weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House. The rather cozy job allowed him to focus much more on writing short stories, and Bridge paid to collect these stories in the spring of 1837 into the volume “Twice-Told Tales,” which finally gave Hawthorne recognition throughout New England. He pursued the illustrator and transcendentalist Sophia Peabody by joining the Utopian community at Brook Farm in 1841, and married her on July 9th, 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where they had three children. His neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson invited him into his social circle, but Hawthorne felt out of place among them and rarely spoke. In 1845 the Hawthornes relocated to his hometown Salem, where they had two more children, and Nathaniel was appointed Surveyor for the District and Inspector of Revenue for the Port. In 1850, after losing his job due to being a registered Democrat, Hawthorne published his most celebrated work, “The Scarlet Letter,” one of the first mass-produced books in America. It sold 2,500 volumes within ten days and earned Hawthorne $1,500 over the next 15 years, an astronomical sum for a writer at the time. The family moved to Lenox, Massachusetts, and Hawthorne began exchanging his writings with his neighbor, Herman Melville. They had a profound impact on each other, and Melville dedicated “Moby-Dick” to him the following year. Hawthorne’s time in the Berkshires was very productive, leading him to write “The House of the Seven Gables” and “The Blithedale Romance” within one year, but they moved back to Concord in 1852 due to the extreme winters. In 1853 Hawthorne wrote “The Life of Franklin Pierce,” the campaign biography of his friend, which depicted him as “a man of peaceful pursuits” but left out Pierce’s drinking habits and whitewashed his apathetic stance on the issue of slavery. When Pierce was elected President, Hawthorne was made the United States consul in Liverpool, England, and the family toured France and Italy after the end of the Pierce Administration. At the outset of the American Civil War Hawthorne brought his family back to the United States and traveled to Washington, D.C., where he met Abraham Lincoln and other notable figures. Failing health prevented him from completing several more romance novels, and he died in his sleep on May 19th, 1864 in Plymouth, New Hampshire. His status as a purveyor of “dark” Romanticism and a biting critic of Puritan New England led to feminist and historicist movements in the late 19th Century, and his work is still studied today as some of the earliest “home-grown” great fictional literature of the United States.