Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. His name by birth was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He added the w to his name when he began to sign his stories. ("Nathaniel Hawthorne" American Writers II) One of Hawthorne's ancestors was actually a judge in the Salem witch trials. The guilt and shame Hawthorne felt of his ancestors were included in some of his stories. (McGraw Hill, pg.67)

Hawthorne's father was a sea captain. He died of fever when Hawthorne was only four. Shortly after his father's death, his mother was forced to move her three children into her parent's home and then into her brother's home in Maine. Hawthorne's childhood was not particularly abnormal, as many famous authors have claimed to have.

Hawthorne traveled to many different places for brief amounts of times. He traveled to New Haven, to Swampscott, and to the mountains of Vermont. Hawthorne kept a notebook with him every place he went in which he jotted observations of places and people, ideas for stories, and phrases, which pleased him. He sold tales and sketches to New England magazines. He was even persuaded to edit a Boston magazine for six months. (American writers II, pg.230)

Hawthorne produced more than twenty tales during three years in concord, sold them to magazines, and then collected them in Mosses from an Old Manse. His reputation was growing. Edgar Allen Poe called Hawthorne, " the example, par excellence, in this country, of the privately admired and publicly unappreciated man of genius." (McGraw Hill, pg.69)

Hawthorne called The Scarlet Letter, " positively a hell-fired story, into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light." Some contemporary critics called it " America's first tragedy." It was no doubt Hawthorne's most widely known story he ever wrote.

Within two years Hawthorne would be married to his wife Sophia. Hawthorne soon realized that supporting a wife was not as easy as he anticipated it to be. He could never manage it by writing stories, so he decided to leave Salem and his mother's house for a political appointment as measurer of coal and salt in the Boston customhouse. The contrast between his old ways and this new way of life was a shock for Hawthorne. He had hoped to discover what "reality" was like as well as earn a respectab

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