It is with great sorrow that we must inform you of the demise of our beloved brother, Nathan Hawthorne. Your prayers are requested to be offered up for the Hawthorne family. Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the allegorical and symbolic narrative.
In His early life, he worked at The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851), have brought him widespread recognition as one of the most accomplished authors of fiction in the history of American literature.
At the beginning of the 17th century, Hawthorne’s family had been residing in Salem. When Nathaniel first started writing, he added the letter “w” to the name of his oldest American ancestor, William Hathorne. William Hathorne was a judge who had condemned a Quaker lady to public flogging.
His fervent support of a “pure,” unaffected style of religious worship, his uncompromising commitment to a plain, almost austere manner of living, and his belief of the “natural depravity” of “fallen” man were all characteristics of Puritan orthodoxy, which he had behaved as a fierce defender of.
As time went on, Hawthorne began to question whether or not the decline in his family’s prosperity and prominence during the 18th century, when other Salem families were becoming wealthy as a result of the lucrative shipping trade, could not be a form of retribution for this act and for the role that William’s son John played as one of three judges in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692.
When Nathaniel’s father, who was a ship’s captain, passed away on one of his journeys, he left his young widow devoid of the resources necessary to care for her two daughters and Nathaniel, who was only four years old at the time. It was her wealthy brothers, the Mannings, who welcomed her into their home. During his teenage years, Hawthorne spent extended amounts of time in Raymond, Maine, on the shores of Sebago Lake.
He also spent his childhood at the mansion that his parents owned in Salem. After spending four years at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, he eventually made his way back to Salem in the year 1825.
When Hawthorne was a young man, he did not manage to distinguish himself. Rather than that, he devoted over a dozen years to reading and attempting to become an expert in the craft of writing fiction.
