Hawthorne: A Life

by Brenda Wineapple

Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said.

Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.

In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls.

Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.

Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.

Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, American History, 19th Century, Politics, Biography Memoir

528 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Brenda Wineapple is the author of the award-winning Hawthorne: A Life, Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner, and Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in many publications, among them The American Scholar, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, Poetry, and The Nation. A Guggenheim fellow, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and twice of the National Endowment for the Humanities, she teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia University and The New School and lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the tortured New England genius responsible for The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and other literary classics. Wineapple (Ecstatic Nation, The Impeachers) shows Hawthorne as the product of a strict, somewhat dour background, born in Salem (his great-great grandfather took part in the Witch Trials) which molded his character while also sparking a rebellion against it. Hawthorne, Wineapple shows, was not a particularly pleasant person; struck with fits of depression and egoistic self-pity, he viewed himself as an unappreciated genius whose constant struggles for employment and the flagging health of his wife Sophia (who suffered chronic, untreatable headaches) and daughter Una (who died at a tragically young age) made it difficult to enjoy life. Nonetheless, his best literary works (and even many of his minor ones) do an excellent job capturing his inner turmoil while skewering Puritanical New England values; if they seem more stilted than some of his contemporaries, his sparse prose and penetrating insight compensates. Wineapple further explores Hawthorne’s literary friendships, from his difficult relationships with Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller to his homoerotic interplay with Herman Melville, and his political views. Hawthorne, a staunchly conservative Democrat, despised abolitionists, expressed little sympathy for slaves or freedmen and used his lifelong friendship with future president Franklin Pierce to secure patronage and government jobs; he was also a raging misogynist who considered women unfit to write fiction. It’s a well-rounded, extremely literate portrait of a difficult subject, a man whose genius is undeniable but whose personality and beliefs often make it difficult to sympathize with him.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

After p. 100.

Well, Ms. Wineapple can't state in any clear and distinct manner what she intimates - but I'll say it for her - even if she didn't mean what I'll say she meant. It's easy for me. After all, there's nothing at stake for me in a summary judgement.

The source of Hawthorne's life-long, unnatural reserve and self-possessed detachment appears to be his experience of about twenty years, from early adolescence and perhaps from an earlier date (these events are rather dimly revealed in the record), of unremitting hypercriticism, shaming and a healthy dose of public humiliation from time to time at the hands of his mother, certainly his aunts and maternal grandmother and perhaps an uncle or two. Most of his Manning relatives - who supported the Hawthorne's after the elder Captain Hawthorne's death of typhoid in Surinam - seemed to have assumed that because they assisted poor relations, they were entitled to "the right of ... treating me with open scorn." (p. 79) In their minds a preternaturally observant and empathetic individual who wanted to write becomes a vain, irresponsible and self-indulgent ingrate for harboring "bubbles" for ambitions. But Hawthorne persisted on the meager proceeds of his grandmother Manning's bequest, and learned to write in seclusion. "I, being heir to a moderate competence," he explained in one of his autobiographical stories, "had avowed my purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would have been a dangerous resolution, any where in the world: it was fatal, in New England." (pp. 73-4)

Margret Fuller, subjected to even worse abuse at the hands of her father, became aggressive in her response. Hawthorne withdrew. After his initial failures in finding a paying publisher and an audience, he returned, once more, to his mother's home in Salem. Tongues wagged. "[H]is failed ventures in the book trade left him prey to the wags of 'public opinion' "[I] felt as if it ranked me with tavern-haunters and town-paupers, - with the drunken poet who hawked his own fourth of July odes, and the broken soldier who had been good for nothing since the last war." (p. 83) As his sister, Elizabeth (Ebe) recalled: "It was only after his return to Salem, and when he felt as if he could not get away from there, and yet was conscious of being utterly unlike every one else in the place, that he began to withdraw into himself." (p. 82) And so he persisted for a decade in nearly impenetrable solitude - for which I am sure he was deeply grateful. But after so long a time, as Wineapple writes (p. 96), he became "a man alone, unappreciated, timorous, an owl afraid of the light, rarely venturing forth until dusk, withdrawn from society into the nocturnal world of fantasy." As he wrote to Henry W. Longfellow in 1837 (p. 97) "I have made a captive of myself and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out - and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out."

Of course, none of this would stand up in court, none of the principles having been deposed. But as far as I can tell, nothing else in Wineapple's (or Mellow's) biography makes sense of Hawthorne's peculiar development.

What was it with Bostonians and Salem-ites of those days? Were they genetically predisposed to delight in deliberate and sadistic cruelty to defenseless children, even to the point of perversion? Apparently so.

I make no attempt to conceal my limitless rage at such persons. Of course, I have no academic reputation to establish or defend. How wonderfully liberating to write what one thinks!

At End.

From that early date (circa 1830), apart from externals, little in Hawthorne's life changed. After Hawthorne returned to Concord from his years as American consul in England (in 1860 or 1861), Hawthorne bought the Alcott home, and built himself a tower room, which I have visited, with a trap door in the floor as an entrance. He wrote there, and when he sat at his desk, his chair, and his weight, rested on that door. As Bronson Alcott observed (p. 339), "See how he behaves, as if he were the foreigner still, though installed in his stolen castle and its keeper, his moats wide and deep, his drawbridges all up on all sides, and he secure from invasion."

Of course, he paid a very high price for this "solipsistic splendor" (p. 364) - ever enraged, hyper-vigilant, ever poised to defend himself from the emotional and verbal abuse of persons long dead - ever a prisoner of himself. His detachment was such that he could formulate in solitude the most insulting, condescending observations of which he was capable (as caustic as any ever committed to paper), giving vent to rage that one might trace, were the record complete, to particular sources, but directed now against all and sundry, publish these observations, and yet respond to the equally hostile reactions that his words evoked with honest and genuine amazement - quite as if he were surprised that anyone had noticed. After all, his targets in the present were merely surrogates.

Regarding "Hawthorne" as biography.
I have noted that I object to Wineapple's suggestive but vague account of Hawthorne's first twenty-five years of life. I understand that the record in incomplete and inconclusive. But there is nothing uncertain about Hawthorne's way of being in the world thereafter, which Wineapple describes as fully and evocatively as any reader might require. No doubt whatever. And over the course of twenty or thirty pages that way of being in the world becomes a fixed attribute of Hawthorne's existence. So for a hundred pages Wineapple hedges and supposes and equivoates. Then clarity, and she doesn't acknowledge this discontinuity. I consider this procedure faulty.

Of course, Hawthorne's way of being in the world came from somewhere, somehow. I, for one, would welcome a series of possibilities that are consistent with the evidence but from which no one can formulate a complete account and conclusive argument. I, for one, will fill in the blanks, and resolve the discontinuities from what I read. Yet I have not read every word that Hawthorne ever wrote as has Wineapple, and I've not puzzled over their meaning as has Wineapple. So I am not equipped to make sense of Hawthorne's whole life, and if anyone is, that person would be Brenda Wineapple. I think that the responsibility of rendering a whole life falls to her, because she chose to write a biography. I can easily accommodate uncertainty. That doesn't bother me in the least. But I do expect a "maximum likelihood" solution or several solutions, if there are multiple, equally plausible solutions, and I expect to consider rationale, etc. What I can't accept is discontinuity unacknowledged and unaddressed.

But once Wineapple brings her account of Hawthorne's life into his thirty-something years, I find her narrative flawless, beautifully constructed and expressed. In these pages Wineapple has given us perfectly executed biography. And she renders Hawthorne's suffering in his "solipsistic splendor" quite palpable. She evokes in me a sympathy for this helplessly self-destructive person, who wouldn't be helped, that Mellow can't or won't but in any case doesn't. By the last page, I came to believe that I had acquired a finger-tip grasp of Hawthorne's experience of himself and the world, accurate, I think, or at least momentarily convincing.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very readable with short chapters. Cradle to grave biographies can be depressing but, in this case, it was almost a relief when Hawthorne dies.

Emily Dickinson wrote that “Hawthorne appalls, entices.” She was writing about his work, but the same can be said about him as a person, in which case I’ll flip the sentiments: at first I was enticed, then appalled. I may write a longer review after I flip back through the book.

I read this for the Book Cougars Scarlet Summer and it also qualifies for Sue’s Big Book Summer Challenge!

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not easy to write a biography of someone whose middle name might as well have been Ambivalence. Wineapple's bio is the more entertaining of modern bios because she really emphasizes this peculiar aspect of both his persona and his appeal. A notorious fence-sitter, NH professed indifference to abolition, feminism, politics, and just about every other concern of the real world, claiming the artist must reside in the imaginary. In reality, he wasn't above pressing the flesh, calling in chits, and playing the victim to secure political appointments. The readings of his novels and stories are especially insightful here; nobody should teach The Scarlet Letter without consulting this for background, especially those who presume that the book has been "ruining literacy since 1850" (to cite a thread topic somewhere around here). I wish she'd been kinder to The Blithedale Romance, which is certainly the most modern of Hawthorne's novels in sensibility. Extra points for the clever opening: instead of picturing Hawthorne himself on his deathbed, or at the moment of his firing from the Custom House in 1849, we are introduced to his son, Julian, caretaker of his father's reputation, being tried for fraud. It makes for a nifty way to introduce the theme of Maule's curse.

[Arminius · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book boring. Other than writing "The Scarlet Letter," " The House of the Seven Gables,""The Blithdale Romance" et al he struggled at making a living his entire life. I started to read this book because I found out he was a good friend of President Franklin Pierce. They both attended Bowdoin College. The President graduated in 1824 while Hawthorne along with Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had graduated in 1825.

Although his great works have stood the test of time, he had made little money from them. He spent most of his life working in various custom houses collecting import duties which he obtained through his friendship with President Pierce. It was sort of sad that he could not devote his life to just writing.

[Helga Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography Hawthorne: A Life by Wineapple captured the contradictory character of Hawthorne.

Hawthorne was a New England writer during the time of the Alcotts, Thoreau, Dickinson, Emerson, Longfellow, Fuller, Whitman and Melville. He was never happy where ever he was, and felt unfulfilled as a writer though he did write books that have stood the test of time with The Scarlett letter, The House of Seven Gables, and Blithedale Romance.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a detached, reserved man who struggled at making a living his entire life. He was a friend of President Franklin Pierce and attended Bowdoin College with him. He spent much of his life working in custom houses collecting import duties. He professed indifference to abolition, feminism and politics and believed the artist must live in the imaginary. But he did not hesitate to get political appointments. He lived during a very tumultuous time during the Civil War but was disconnected from it. He thought slavery would wither and die by itself. He thought Lincoln, whom he met once was ineffective. He felt both sides were confused in their views on the war. He was married to Sophia Peabody and had three children which did not help his financial situation.

He was always homesick for wherever he had just left but not happy when he lived there. Near the end of his life he was depressed and physically unwell. He could not finish the last two novels he was working on.

I read this book because I was reading other books during this time period. I also liked some of his work, especially Scarlett Letter so I wanted to find out more about his life and his writing.

[Sher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This biography looks closely at Hawthorne's life and works and ties them together. All of his writings are analyzed and viewed from the perspective that his works were his life. The author makes hundreds of assumptions and conclusions throughout the book, that I found difficult to accept, because the writer presents her statements as facts, followed by zero evidence. Creative nonfiction? Anyway, the book brings alive the life and times and work of the man. The writing and weave of this book is almost as atmospheric as Hawthorne's writings, which might be a strong compliment. But, I still found myself immersed in so many assertions that I questioned. A difficult book to review.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hawthorne's sister once said her brother wrote only about himself. She was right, but his "self" emerged in very disguised ways, and what Wineapple has done in her 500 plus page biography is to penetrate those disguises. She writes that the hallmark of Hawthorne's prose is "alienation, duplicity, and the sense of living double, not being what one seems or what others take one to be." In this biography she follows the chronology of Hawthorne's short stories and novels (he was not prolific) and what was going on his life as he wrote them. It's an engrossing account, especially if the reader is familiar with his works, of which THE SCARLET LETTER is the most well-known.

Hawthorne was a conflicted man, private, often even reclusive, and yet he was a writer and needed a public audience to survive. Until a publisher created a partial success with his SCARLET LETTER in l850, it was hand-to-mouth existence, scratching out a living by selling his short stories one at a time to various publications, usually for a pittance. In reading his several collections of short stories, we forget that these were written over a period of years and only later packaged and sold as a collection

In Hawthorne there is always the conflict between an individual's values and the society he lives in, whether it be in tortured moral relationships, as with Hester Prynne, the compromised Coverdale in BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, unable to commit himself to the effort needed to build a society, or the distortions of the past in THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES,. A related theme in his stories, and one that is ironically reflected in his life, is the gap between the intellect and the emotions.. The first attitude is a critical, even cynical outlook in dealing with other people, the second is a type of loving compassion. Hawthorne's life was a uneasy mixture of both. He could dismiss Emerson's transcendentalism, for example, as intellectual moonshine, but at the same time be a loving husband and father, and close to people that he liked. But he never went out of his way to get to know people.

In Hawthorne's life, a marriage and three children put him in grim financial circumstances. He had to compromise and find a financially renumerative job which he did, a patronage position as a customs inspector. However, that did not last, and he was soon desperate again. He was not a political man (part of his problem) but interestingly when he had to, he pulled political strings, and wrote a l850 official campaign document for his old friend, Franklin Pierce who became president. That led to another patronage job, this one as the American consul in Liverpool, a position that lasted for five years, and allowed Hawthorne and family to spend another two years in Europe.

This was on the eve of the Civil War, and Hawthorne took a dim view of both sides. He thought slavery would wither and die by itself. As for efforts to abolish slavery and preserve the union, he felt idealists were usually self-deceptive fools and he wasn't sure the union was worth preserving. Lincoln, whom he met once, he thought was ineffective, and he considered both sides confused in their rationalizations for he war.

His final years were sad ones. He was physically unwell, depressed most of the time - about his health, lack of artistic output (his inspiration had pretty much died up and he couldn't finish two novels he was working on), financial worries, and the Civil War, and just seemed like a much older man than 59 when he died in l864. He suggested, half seriously, that only old men be sent into battle, preferably sick old men, so that when they were killed, it wouldn't be much of a loss as they would be dying soon anyway.

Hawthorne's last two unfinished works were SEPTIMUS FELTON, OR THE ELIXIR OF LIFE, and DOLLIVER'S ROMANCE, about which Wineapple writes that they might be read as an argument for or against suicide. Hawthorne's life and his works, too, are full of a dark ambivalence, no wonder that Herman Melville referred to Hawthorne's "blackness" and that readers for 150 years have found a dark side of America reflected in his works.

[Susan O · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm of two minds in rating this book. On the one hand, it is full of great information about both Hawthorne and his works, but on the other the author seems to have a type of circular reasoning. She analyzes Hawthorne in light of his works, describing him in the words of his own characters. Then she analyzes his works based on his own circumstances and life.

Wineapple is a well-respected, award winning author, so I have no reason to doubt her, but I would have preferred a biography, and character analysis, based more on external sources than on Hawthorne's works. The book is very comprehensive and well-written, so it will suit some people very well. Perhaps if you are more familiar with Hawthorne's work going into the book.

[Mollie Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear, well-written, interesting biography detailing Hawthorne's life. I was hoping that if I knew something about his life, I would understand his novels better. I have made it a goal of mine this year to complete all of his novels, short fiction, and the essays in the LOA volume on my shelf. This summer I plan to visit literary Concord, NH and stop by Wayside, his Concord home.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is the good of literary biography? I am not a great reader of the genre, possibly because every example I've ever read has had a passage like this in it, from Brenda Wineapple's popular and absorbing 2003 life of Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Like most of Hawthorne's fiction, "Rappaccini's Daughter" is a biographical palimpsest. Dr. Rappaccini is Sophia's father and Waldo Emerson. (Concord busybodies said Lidian Emerson was poisoning herself with medicine extracted from several plants.) Rappaccini is also Fuller's father, whose stiff-backed education of Margaret was as destructive, if as well intentioned; he's Uncle Robert, another horticulturalist of decided purpose; and he's Hawthorne, the father-gardener, who fusses over his wife's diet and her health.

Can one of the strangest and most profound short stories ever written really be reduced to Hawthorne's strained relationship with his Uncle Robert? Any gentle boy on earth can feel misunderstood by his enterprising uncle, but only one wrote "Rappaccini's Daughter," the source of whose mystery may be elsewhere than in mundane familial discord.

But this mismatch between the universalizing force of the work and the tedious particulars of the life is only a small part of the broader problem to which Hawthorne's own anguish and ambivalence and ambiguity about his literary vocation bear such rueful witness: art is out of place in modernity—an illicit and impenetrable red letter in the gray gloom—uncompensated by its system of values and inexplicable by its methods of comprehension.

It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss biography so hastily. Wineapple reports that when Hawthorne was in England during his consular appointment in the Pierce administration, he made a literary pilgrimage:

Hawthorne stopped for a night in Lichfield to visit the birthplace of Dr. Johnson. "I set my foot upon the worn steps, and laid my hand on the wall of the house, because Johnson's hand and foot might have been in those same places."

Keeping in mind this desire to commune with the dead, we might also remember that Dr. Johnson himself was a biographer and a biographical subject; he recommends the genre for a particular purpose:

[N]o species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful, none can more certainly enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition. (The Rambler, No. 60)

Biography gives us not so much direct instruction from the vanished, but the indirect truths we glean by sympathizing with their lives as recounted by a skilled artificer. What can Hawthorne's life teach us? Or—to respect Wineapple's artistry as biographer—what does she mean us to learn from Hawthorne: A Life?

She begins at the end, with the decisive failures and equivocal successes of Hawthorne's three children. She opens with dissolute Julian's conviction of fraud in 1912 and goes on to relate the eccentric self-ordination and charitable works of Rosa and the strange early death of Una at age 33. From her first pages on, Wineapple puts the emphasis on perversely blighted hopes, a canker running down the generations, as befits the haunted fiction of the past-obsessed author who is her subject.

But Hawthorne's is not necessarily a life of outward tragedy. Emerson the indomitable optimist probably had it worse, all except the money troubles. Most of Hawthorne's easily explicable pain is crowded into his early years: the death of his father at sea when he was only four; his aforementioned strained relationship with his maternal uncles and his mother's proud family, which he later showily rejects via his literary identification with the paternal line, the stern Puritanical witch-hunting Hathornes; and the at least partially psychosomatic afflictions that kept him secluded as a child, foreshadowing his future wife's similar invalidism and the mysterious undiagnosed illness that killed him in 1864—likely cancer or a systemic infection, but thought to be mental in its origin by many of his contemporaries, and sometimes by himself.

The pioneering psychological novelist's tragedy was inward, if also social. As Wineapple represents it, and a reading of the work supports her, Hawthorne's problem was his unlived life, or two unlived lives. He never felt he had really succeeded in becoming a productive man as his society defined middle-class masculinity. But he likewise did not fully commit himself to literature—save for two fertile periods, one of short-story writing in his late 20s and early 30s, the other of novel-writing in his late 40s—and he judged himself a failure in that vocation too, both by his own severe internal standards and by the standards of the marketplace, with its preference for fiction of a more morally and politically intelligible, not to mention overtly entertaining, variety. (Nothing in the biography is more poignant than Hawthorne's unremitting terror of poverty in his sometimes delirious final illness.)

Assessing Hawthorne's gender politics, Wineapple is far more forgiving than her generation of feminist critics tended to be. She duly registers his notorious expectoration about "the damned mob of scribbling women" and the vituperative judgment against female authorship that opens his sketch of the antinomian Anne Hutchinson. But she also observes that he was caught in an ideological trap, since American, Protestant, and capitalist norms of masculine exertion, social usefulness, and material productivity tended—and still tend—to feminize authorship as such, especially when it generates ambiguous and immaterial fiction like Hawthorne's, fiction that serves no obvious end and earns no clear reward.

Add to that social conundrum Hawthorne's individual experiences—his paternal loss, the dominance of strong women over his life—and his sexist comments become legible as defensive plaints guarding against what Wineapple wisely calls his "unsettling, overwhelming identification with women." And finally, she concludes, it can't be denied that he created in Hester Prynne the most memorable, brilliant female character in 19th-century American literature.

Wineapple herself nowhere excels more as a writer than in her depictions of the female figures that defined Hawthorne's biography. Here, for instance, is a condensation of her small, precise study of Hawthorne's sister Elizabeth (AKA Ebe), "an American hamadryad of untapped potential" (and I must note, too, that Wineapple has the good taste, unlike other commentators, to eschew charges of incest between Ebe and Nathaniel):

She loved nature and books, particularly Shakespeare, whom she read assiduously at the age of twelve, and by adolescence her wit was dry, her humor pungent. She usually cut straight to the marrow, telling the truth and damning the devil. (Of Emerson and Thoreau, she said: "I have a better opinion of their taste than to suppose that they really do think as they profess to.") And thought she affected to do little, she excelled at everything she did. She studied languages with ease, Spanish, French, and German. […] Ebe rose late. She avoided obligatory social calls. "People can talk about nothing tolerable but their neighbor's faults," she grimaced at fourteen. She considered letter writing demoralizing as well as ruinous to the style, and she abhorred can't, superstition, and organized religion. […] Although in youth she enjoyed a bracing sleigh ride or an unhurried sojourn in Newburyport with her cousins, in later life she withdrew from society, devoting herself to a translation of Cervantes, never finished, and to walking alone in the forest collecting flowers and ferns. […] She never married.

Life writing—biography and autobiography—is the twin of the novel, and such a concise portrait of a beguiling side character is the envy of any novelist.

Wineapple's most dazzling turn comes in her portrayal of Hawthorne's wife, Sophia. It is so easy to cast her as the villain in this story: the priggish, uptight spouse whose small-minded respectability held Hawthorne back from what might otherwise have been Melvillean exuberance and revolt on the page (as if this were likely).

Sophia did set herself apart from her famously progressive family—the Peabodys—not only by invalidism, but also by a kind of willful contrarian complacency and conservatism that would also drive Hawthorne's later politics. And Sophia was if anything more conservative than her husband. Take, for instance, her reaction to the death by shipwreck of the brilliant feminist—and possible model for Hester Prynne—Margaret Fuller, returning from Italy with an Italian Catholic husband everyone thought beneath her and their out-of-wedlock child:

"I am really glad she died," [Sophia] concluded without feeling, "—there was no other peace or rest to be found for her—especially if her husband was a person so wanting in force & availability."

Furthermore, if Hawthorne sometimes disapproved of female authorship—but not always: Fanny Fern and Rebecca Harding Davis won his admiration—then Sophia disapproved more, even when invited to publish her own work:

"You forget that Mr. Hawthorne is the Belleslettres portion of my being, and besides that I have a repugnance to female authoresses in general…"

Yet consider the other half of the 19th century's gender ideology: man was to act and to earn in public, while woman was to superintend the manners and morals of the bourgeois home. Man and woman were one flesh, and together made a world. Sophia, like Hawthorne, acted her part. But Wineapple brilliantly evokes how much more there was to her than this role: her sometimes cunning shyness, her domestic eroticism, and above all her work as an artist, like those other female artists—Hester, Hilda—who inhabit Hawthorne's fiction.

To enhance the drama of her narrative, Wineapple resorts to dialogue tags when quoting from her subjects' letters and diaries. Over and over again, we read that Hawthorne and company chirped, bellowed, sputtered, grumbled, shuddered, snorted, stormed, snapped, griped, chortled, scolded, wailed, moaned, exploded, cringed, pined, groaned, snarled, muttered, sniffed, and more. This is a risky grab for vitality even in fiction—where you should usually just stick to said—but it does give Hawthorne: A Life its unique air of operatic urgency.

On the back of the hardcover, the late and revered Hawthorne scholar Sacvan Bercovitch responds to this emotive heat by calling Wineapple's work, "Clearly the best biography of Hawthorne; the Hawthorne for our time." But what is "our time"?

Bercovitch no doubt meant that Wineapple is up-to-date about gender and race and focuses on these issues, particularly the latter. Her biography culminates in a long, thrilling narrative of Hawthorne's self-imposed political isolation during the Civil War. We might now say that he was #canceled by his New England colleagues when he retained his Democratic commitments—partly out of loyalty to his close friend, the former president Franklin Pierce—and expressed skepticism about abolitionist fervor and the wisdom of waging war to solve the political crisis:

Many of Hawthorne's contemporaries had to struggle with Hawthorne's quirks, and though they genuinely respected his work, they despised much of what it stood for: doubt, darkness, and the Democratic Party.

While we have retained the concern with race 16 years after this book's publication, I am not otherwise sure that 2003 is our time anymore. Wineapple doesn't deny or attempt to mitigate Hawthorne's racism:

No doubt about it: to Hawthorne, blacks and Italians and Jews are inferior to Anglo-Saxons, whom he doesn't much like either.

But she does insist that this racism is not what set him apart from his contemporaries. Predictably Sophia was worse, but even passionate white progressives from Elizabeth Peabody to Abraham Lincoln were also biological racists. It was rather Hawthorne's misanthropy, his irony, his mistrust of grand causes, and his fear of violence that separated him from his New England fellows as he wasted away in the war years.

Wineapple does gently censure Hawthorne—often implicitly reproving him by resonant quotations from his progressive sisters-in-law, from abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, from Harriet Beecher Stowe, and from others as they chide the author for his political aloofness and irresponsibility. But even Wineapple balks at the Transcendentalists' bien-pensant—we'd now call it "woke"—celebration of John Brown, whom she frankly represents as a fanatical butchering terrorist: "This sort of mawkishness, ill informed and dangerous, revolted Hawthorne," she writes with evident approval of how the author dismissed Boston and Concord intellectuals' radical chic.

While Hawthorne's biological racism belongs to its time, his apprehension that any attempt to bring freedom at gunpoint would only lead to a futile cycle of violence may have seemed timely and even welcome not only to the much-mocked and -reviled "Peace Democrats" of 1863, but to the equally condemned peace Democrats of 2003, "our time" no more.

Wineapple finally credits Hawthorne for his doubt and darkness, because those too are America's story, along with the putative spread of liberty and the dream of progress:

[T]he national hypocrisy...has always been Hawthorne's subject, whether he writes about Puritans, Tories, rebels, or transcendentalists. America is conceived in liberty and oppression, and with this insight, Hawthorne moves beyond a consideration of local politics, beyond even his own racism, to the extent that it's possible, to a fine-tuned perception of America's heritage.

Which returns us, finally, from politics to literature. Hawthorne had political views, as he had familial quarrels, just like anyone. But we care about him only because he did what no one else could: he wrote those stories, those novels, fictions richer and more mesmerizing than most of his contemporaries' precisely because they called the status of fiction itself into question rather than simply trying to pass the time or hammer home some propaganda, even in a good cause:

Writing meant everything to Hawthorne and yet cost everything. It was his heart of darkness, an isolation no one could fathom or relieve; it was a source of shame as much as pleasure, and a necessity he could neither forego nor entirely approve. […] Hawthorne mistrusts the sturdy fibers of the actual world—the stuff of realism, to say nothing of the facile stuff of human progress, human order, and human knowledge.

As in the classics he echoed—Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton—his tragic flaw was intimately coiled around his greatness: alienation, despair, division, the incapacity for normal life, the inability to believe that humankind could ever finally be made right. And as in the moderns he anticipated or inspired—Kafka, Faulkner, Borges—he saw that these doubts extend to the very language and literary form in which he expressed them.

Can the biographer explore such heights and depths, or is the form too limited by its very nature, its capture by the verifiable and explicable? Wineapple gets closest to Hawthorne whenever she departs from chronicle and gives us scene and reflection. Maybe this is only to again pay the back-handed compliment of calling her book "novelistic."

Even so, I end with a passage rich, if not in Johnsonian moralism, then in Hawthornian suggestiveness. Hawthorne, recently married, is roused in the night by neighbors to help find the body of a local woman who has drowned herself. After he does so—after he observes the ghastly rigor mortis of the corpse—Wineapple imagines the dead body as an emblem of Hawthorne's vision and experience, both the personal and political anxieties that marred his often lonely life and the metaphysical fear and trembling that unforgettably disturbs, still, the surface of his—like his biographer's—most poised and elegant prose:

Hurrying back to Sophia that unlit night, Hawthorne might easily have been warning himself against the perils of isolation. In the water he had seen a distorted image which, with stiffened arms and distended legs, spurned all Concord's [i.e., the Transcendentalists'] petty homilies of life and death: a poor lonely girl, homegrown expatriate, plunged beneath the river's veil.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

As biographer Brenda Wineapple observes, Nathaniel Hawthorne has been the subject of scores of biographies and studies even before his death, and the pace has hardly slackened in the 21st century. This is the only Hawthorne bio I've read, except for 10-page introductory essays to some of his works, so I can't compare it to the library of other bios. But this one is very good and seems to me to have the right mix of life coverage and literary review. Importantly, it doesn't shy away from the troublesome parts of Hawthorne's beliefs and the awkward actions he took (usually, didn't take) throughout his life.

There's a lot to unpack in Hawthorne's complicated, exciting, challenging life. Here's a very brief summary. He was born early in the 1800s in Salem, Mass., to a seafaring father of a family that dated back to the 1600s. The family on both sides had a Puritan heritage, which while still revered in Salem at the time, also had a taint of spoilage, as people realized that the Salem Witch Trials were an abomination. Hawthorne's great grandfather presided over many of those trials and ordered people to be whipped to near-death and to be hung.

So, that's the family legacy. Then, Hawthorne's father dies when he's 8 years old of malaria or yellow fever while captaining a sailing vessel on which he hoped to make his fortune. Hawthorne grows up in poverty with his mother and two younger sisters, living off the kindness of his mother's family, the Mannings, who were prosperous merchants. The family shuttles between borrowed rooms in Salem and a house built in Maine on the Manning family's inherited lands. He loved Maine, and in fact had what was probably a psychosomatic extension of a real leg injury when he was forced to live in Salem, rather than have the freedom to walk by himself in the Maine woods.

Hawthorne was close throughout his life with his sisters, especially Elizabeth, known as Ebe. The biographer quotes extensively from her letters and articles, and they are hilarious, biting, sharp. She is a satirist on the level of Twain, and I wish she'd had a chance for a fuller career than what was available to women at the time.

Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College in Maine and made lifelong friends with Franklin Pierce, who was elected US President in 1852; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who reached literary fame far before Hawthorne; and several major judges and members of Congress. This was in a class of 38 (male) students.

And then for the next 20 years, Hawthorne bumbled around. He wrote scores of essays, book reviews, short stories. He wrote thousands of letters to men and women of note, as well as to women he had romantic feelings for. He took long walks on the beach in Salem in the afternoon. He worked as an accountant and horse trader for the Mannings, and in the Customs House in Salem on a political appointment from a friend.

Saying he bumbled around isn't quite fair, as he was more diligent and intellectual than most of us can conceive. But, as the author explains, Hawthorne couldn't shake the idea that being a man of letters, particularly fiction, was an inadequate calling. His Puritan roots said you have to do something more useful, such as being a sailor or farmer, and his aristocratic pretensions about himself said that if you are going to be a writer, it has to be a higher calling than fiction. In those days, "novelist" wasn't really a profession. It had emerged in England, but it was just starting in the US to become a career, rather than the purview of gentleman and gentlewomen poets, etc.

Those short stories plumbed the depths of the early American experience, drawing on family stories and regional legends. Ghosts, Puritans, loners -- people with secrets were his subjects.

So Hawthorne brooded and brooded. He also eventually got over what was clearly a fear of women and began to flirt with Elizabeth Peabody, one of three sisters in a family that sort of resembled his own, with a father who died early and significant financial constraints that led the mom and daughters to live with family assistance. The oldest daughter, Mary, would marry noted educator Horace Mann and live in luxury. Elizabeth, a bit strange but vivacious and courteous to the point that people said she never turned down an opportunity to help anyone, seemed to be Hawthorne's favorite. But quietly, his head was turned by the youngest, Sophia, who spent her childhood suffering from migraines and, equally, suffering from the poisons put in her body in an attempt to heal her. Eventually, Hawthorne asked her to marry him, and then forced her to keep it a secret for more than 3 years while he tried to get up enough money for them to live, and for him to have the nerve to tell his sisters. (They didn't much like Sophia, especially Ebe.)

In the middle of the engagement, Hawthorne lived for 5 months at Brooke Farm, the experimental farming utopia set up in West Newton, about 10 miles west of Boston. This would be the subject of his book "Blithedale Romance" and his criticism of true believers in anything. He claimed it was to test whether he and Sophia could join the community, but the biographer says it was his last-ditch effort to run away from marriage, women and sex. Brooke Farm didn't take for Hawthorne, who quit and later sued to get back his investment.

Anyway, finally Hawthorne marries Sophia; he was 38, and she was 32. They have a remarkably happy and close marriage. She worshipped him, and she was his intellectual equal in a lot of ways, which gave him the confidence that he never felt, even as he hobnobbed with Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, and so on. All these guys thought he was incredibly smart and talented -- so did Poe -- and publishers clamored for his work. But Hawthorne was driven by demons that are well explained by the biographer, to the extent they can be known. They involved those Puritan roots, but contrasted by an apparent atheism. They included a belief in the life of the mind, but a belief that real work had to be either physical or financially renumerative. They included enjoying the attention of women, but being scared of them, particularly the more emancipated ones he occasionally met in his Boston-Salem circles. He skewered those types of women in some stories, but he also praised them, such as Hester Prynne, even when their lives ended tragically. The biographer says Hester is the greatest woman character in American literature of the 19th century, which is a good argument to make, and it's remarkable given that it came from such a repressed man.

Anyway, the family lived destitute for almost a decade. Truly destitute, like being kicked out of rental homes for nonpayment, like living on the fallen apples in orchards, like borrowing money from friends but without any realistic hope of repaying it. Meanwhile, reviewers were still singing his praises.

And then, luck struck. First, it was bad luck. Hawthorne got a plum government job, and he felt he could probably even write in the evenings as well. Then, due to politics, he was accused of malfeasance and kicked out. They were at rock bottom, when a new publisher came calling, and Hawthorne showed him a draft of "The Scarlet Letter." This was started as another short story, but Hawthorne said it got out of hand and became a short novel. Recognizing the genius, the publisher pushed him to finish it, and brought it out with great publicity as soon as possible. And suddenly, Hawthorne wasn't just known to the intellgensia, but was one of the most famous authors in America. And his finances were solid for the first time ever. He was 42 years old, and it was his first novel (actually, his second, but he didn't even tell his wife about the first one, as it was published to a resounding lack of interest in his early 20s).

Less than a year later, he finished "House of the Seven Gables," again drawing on the Puritan past with a gothic tinge. And people liked it even more. (To my taste, "Scarlett Letter" is much better...)

And not much more than a year later, he finished "Blithedale Romance," which sold well but received less acclaim.

It's a remarkable output for a man in his mid-40s, and it cemented his place as one of America's first great novelists. He had financial stability, though he kept moving his family every few months from one rental property to another, seeking either the peace he needed to write, or the society of a town, which he enjoyed. One great anecdote is about him renting a house from Emerson, who sends Thoreau there to plant a vegetable garden for the new tenants. Thoreau then starts casually stopping by for dinner and a chat.

Imagine moving in those circles. And then imagine on top of it being involved in the angry politics of pre-Civil War America as well. In 1852, Pierce was elected president, with some help from Hawthorne who wrote his presidential biography (for cash), and Hawthorne was rewarded with a post in Liverpool, England, which he used (legally) to amass a small fortune over the next 4 years. He stayed in Europe, mostly England and Italy, for another 2-plus years with Sophia and their three children, soaking up culture and history. He wrote nothing during those 7 years, retiring at his peak, so to speak.

Then he came back in his mid-50s, financially solvent but still nervous about income, and with secession about to happen. He also found that his writing well had run dry. Or at least his well of stories based on Puritans and deep American history, and he also realized that the national taste was changing outside of his subject matter. (He was furious that Harriett Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" sold 50 times the copies of his novels, as he considered topical books with a lot of action to be junk; he believed that the best novels, which he called "romances," combined real and fiction into a world that told eternal truths.)

In those declining years, he scribbled a few well-received essays about his experiences in England and Italy, but he didn't do much during his 5 or so years home before he died at age 59, perhaps by suicide due to the pain of intestinal problems.

One more thing to mention. Hawthorne knew all the Northern abolitionists -- they were his friends and colleagues. But he didn't believe in abolition, equality of Blacks, or any of that. He didn't exactly support slavery, but he thought it was a pretty good deal for a race who he felt couldn't take care of itself. And because he had a negative view of human nature anyway, he felt that inequality was just the way things are -- whether by race, religion, sex, class, etc. And he felt fervently that trying to change one of the world's basic principles, such as inequality, would inevitably create unimagined new problems, a Pandora's box that shouldn't be opened. His advice about slavery was to let it die a natural death, even if it took 100 years.

The biographer uses a lot of the latter part of the book to explain Hawthorne's view and puts it in fascinating context. Again, his friends were the leaders of the anti-slavery movement. But his great friend Franklin Pierce set up the 1850 compromise that allowed slavery to continue in the US, arguing that keeping the Union was more important. Hawthorne sided with Pierce. And he wrote about it on the even of the Civil War and during its early years, saying that the chaos and bloodshed weren't worth it.

These parts make a sad conclusion to the book, as Hawthorne was on the wrong side of history and morality. Remarkably for a man who thought so much about his own flaws and those of others, he was blind to this one in himself.

[Caroline · Rating 2 out of 5]

Is there a genre of biography called "snide?" Who knew? I was not expecting this book to be like this - I have not read any of Brenda Wineapple's books before but I know she is well respected and has written several well respected books, and this book was a few years old so it didn't come out of the new snottiness that has pervaded American culture over the past four or five years. What is going on here? The author's voice was constantly present, and it was a negative voice.

Typical example: She quotes letters he and Sophia wrote to one another after their wedding, expressing their happiness, then she quotes another contemporary comment on them, but I don't believe it supports what she says: "To Thomas Higginson...the Hawthorne marriage represented nothing more than narcissim a deux:...'Both Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne came to each from a life of seclusion; he had led it by peculiarity of nurture, she through illness; and when they were united, they simply admitted each other to that seclusion, leaving the world almost as far off as before.'" To me it does not sound like he said they were narcissists; if he said it somewhere else, she should have quoted that. And she ends the paragraph: "Wedded bliss or blanketed self-absorption; or both? We shall see." What?? Is that necessary?? And, shall we really see?

Worse: Sophia miscarried their first child. This is what she has to say about it, in total: "In February 1843 Sophia suffered a miscarriage. Fast recovering, she chirped that 'men's accidents are God's purposes.' Hawthorne scribbled the consolation into his journal, and like childish vandals, he and Sophia scratched it onto the window of his study." What?? How does she know that those words were "chirped"? The chirping and the childish vandals make it sound like neither of these two much cared about losing a baby, so self-centered are they, when without her helpful comments I might have thought they were fending off grief.

It really put me off. I read to the end because I wanted the information, but especially after having just read Megan Marshall's fat book on the Peabody sisters, which covers a little of the same ground and many of the same people, the tone grated on me almost from start to finish. Marshall was scholarly, and found a way to occasionally suggest that someone was not being quite honest with themselves, without systematically tearing her characters down through choice of words. I wonder if Wineapple really dislikes all of these people as much as she seemed to - especially Sophia Hawthorne, who variously 'chirped,' 'enthused,' 'snapped' her thoughts, was never sick a day in her life but was just a humongous faker. I suppose I should have expected the overall attitude when her prologue focused on Hawthorne's son Julian being convicted of fraud.

It was disheartening to get a clear picture of Hawthorne's complete lack of sympathy with abolitionism, I hadn't known much of anything about his political associations. He tended to be loyal to his friends regardless of their politics, which harmed his career along the way. Parts of the epilogue were really lovely, I wish the rest of the book could have been like that. Despite the epilogue, I came away from this book with the feeling that he wasn't so great after all - which I know isn't right because The Scarlet Letter is one of the greatest books ever written, and Chapter 18 of House of Seven Gables is a real tour de force, and the extended block of quote from The Marble Faun that she provides made me want to read that book because it was so well written.

Why spend so long with a set of people, to research and write a big book, if you have such a lack of regard for them? and if you're such a nitpicker, be sure you don't tell us twice in 50 pages that someone said Hawthorne and Bronson Alcott together would add up to a man. Or add an extra zero to the amount it cost to buy into the Brook Farm commune.

I'm going to cleanse my palate by reading Henry James's book about Hawthorne, and I'll avoid books by this author in the future.

[Jean Blackwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very well-done biography of Hawthorne. I read it mainly because I am fascinated by 19th century New England and the amazing collection of people who lived and worked there.

You don't read this book and come away with a whole lot of admiration for Hawthorne, who was self-centered, rather lazy, often morose. I felt that the author did not find him all that lovable herself. But he was nonetheless a complex and interesting person, and I certainly find myself more interested in reading his works now than before - I'm reading The House of Seven Gables now.

Wineapple gives us a look at the literary world of New England and at the transcendentalists from a different perspective since Hawthorne knew all the major players like Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott, and was married to Sophia Peabody. Yet he was not one of them.

Although you don't end up admiring Hawthorne much at book's end, you do feel an empathy towards him and an understanding of his rather tortured life. The trials of a sensitive person in the 19th Century were not so very different from those faced in our own age.

[MountainAshleah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not an expert (by any means) on the art and science of biography. While I appreciated the author's detailed and vast research, the biography read more of a journalistic day-in-the-life approach rather than an interpretive approach (my personal preference for biographical studies). I always knew Hawthorne to be a Gloomy Gus, but I didn't know he was such a non-productive fellow (so much time wasted complaining about weather and location--he apparently needed all the stars and moons to line up to be able to work). I also wonder if his gypsy behavior was in part so he didn't have to discipline himself to sit down and WRITE. Sigh. The Scarlet Letter is still to this day (decades after I first read it) the most meaningful book in my life, and Hester Prynne is my all-time favorite literary persona (for me, she transcends the label of "character"). yet I barely remember reading Hawthorne's other major works (I read them so long ago, and they were rather forgettable). The short stories . . . eh . . . they never did much for me. Well, as Bogey says to Bergman, "We'll always have Paris."

[Aurora · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been working as a tour guide at a Hawthorne historical site, so I've been boning up on Hawthorne. I thought this book did a great job of capturing the character of an inherently contradictory person. If you take Hawthorne's own words at any one moment, you get such a different picture of him then what his actions show. Particularly in terms of place: it seems like he's always adamantly homesick for wherever he just left, and never happy with the place he is.

I thought this was a pretty great biography of a sometimes infuriating person. My only minor complaint would be that I'd like to have known a little bit more about what happened to the other people in his life following his death, and maybe a little bit more about how opinion of him has changed over the years.

[Melanie Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful prose and a fascinating snapshot of the man behind the myth, as the cliche goes. As much Hawthorne as I have read, I had not realized that he had such a lout for a son (trading on the family name/fame for cash) or that Pearl was modeled after his elder daughter. With ample research as well as an accessible style, Wineapple's work is both scholarly and worthy of the label page-turner. I think that, in some spots, she could have actually pared back details (such as when she delves into Hawthorne's college years), but in general, an engaging look into how his literary mind worked.

[Dr. Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great biography of Hawthorne. I've been to Concord so many times, so this fascinating story of Hawthorne's life is especially meaningful. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott, Melville - all neighbors and friends, wow! This is the story of Nate Hawthorne and what shaped his life as a writer, including his private life with his wife and family at the Old Manse in Concord and his relationships with the friends who shaped his life as one of the great American authors.

[Lillian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellently written but unfortunately as Hawthorne aged he became more and more unlikeable....and irritating and so did Sophia. Anyone interesting in this literary period and circle would be well disposed to read The Peabodys about Elizabeth, Sophia (Hawthorne) and Mary (Mann) - great book in every way.

[James Vitarius · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well researched and comprehensive biography which makes it essential reading for fans of 19th century American Literature. I bought the book at the House of Seven Gables gift shop in Salem to which I would recommend a visit. Ms. Wineapple's prose was a little dry for my taste but within it one can find nuggets of brilliance that make the time spent reading worthwhile.

[Bill Ardis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat of a frustrating biography. In the end I don't know if I got know Hawthorne very well. That could be to Hawthorne himself, he seems to be a man that wants little to do with others, especially as he ages. Or it could be due to the biographer, at times the book was a bit slow. Still it does provide an interesting glimpse into his life.

[Steven Ehrman]

Interesting biography of one of my favorite authors. Hawthorne burned much of his correspondence, so any in depth look at his life will include some guesswork based upon his very personal works. I recommend.

[Aliesha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Wineapple's book about Emily Dickinson & Higginson, and loved it. _The Scarlet Letter_ is one of my favorite books, so I looked forward to reading this Wineapple.

I was disappointed. The sentence structure was convoluted, the pacing glacial, and the chronology confusing.

[Mary Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

A daunting tome but Wineapple has done extensive research and given an excellent account of the author's life. I learned much about Hawthorne's boyhood that I had read nowhere else. Wineapple identifies a pattern on Hawthorne's part of contradictions; avoiding action (deliberately?) after having made a decision; taking well-thought out steps toward making a "firm" decision and then sidestepping it, backtracking. One step forward, two steps back. The most obvious example was forming an engagement with Sophia Peabody, but then deciding it must be kept secret (from his family and hers); declaring to Sophia that he wanted nothing more than to be with her, but then moving away (to Brook Farm); saying he must earn money to support her before they could marry, but then investing (or gambling?) his substantial savings into an unproven (and ultimately un-achieved) utopia. Though lofty an admirable, this decision ends up with Hawthorne in the red (scarlet?).

In a few places Wineapple compresses the chronology of events in Hawthorne's life without clearly signaling the reader. For example, just after the exposition on a certain topic or person from an early time in Hawthorne's life Wineapple adds how that matter or relationship developed later, giving the reader a sort of "fast forward." It was not always clear how closely in time these two events or experiences were. This was confusing.

[Lelia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this biography. I can’t decide if Hawthorne is boring or if Brenda Wineapple failed to tap Hawthorne’s hidden depths or if Hawthorne and Wineapple simply weren’t a winning combination, but I found the book dull.

Wineapple opts for cleverness rather than real insight. As an example: “The South Sea expedition having gone to Charles Wilkes, not Jeremiah Reynolds, a landlocked Hawthorne celebrated his thirty-third birthday with Bridge in July, staying with him in Augusta along with Bridge’s French tutor, Monsieur Schaeffer, a talkative and cheery man with the unfortunate task of teaching French to blockheads.” The jokey note at the end can’t make up for the extraneous information bogging down that sentence.

And it doesn’t work well in the rest of the book, either. Wineapple often seems to be sneering at the people she's describing. When Hawthorne goes to Brooks Farm Institute, his fiance is left behind. "A communal life of toil was no life for a dove, especially one with a headache," Wineapple writes. Sophia has been sickly and also has developed a habit of being sick, but Wineapple's treatment of her lacks the compassionate yet fair-minded exploration I look for in a good biography.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hawthorne is not my favorite author and my critique of him perhaps mirrors the one Edgar Allan Poe, an author I prefer to him, lauded unflattering reviews at Twice-Told Tales, etc. I denote this in the beginning because my review of this work should readily acknowledge that the subject of this biography is not of natural interest to me normally. What then is more impressive is that Wineapple’s book still held my attention and was sufficiently vivid to give a complete and engaging view of Hawthorne. Since my interest is in education predominantly, the chapter entitled “The Era of Good Feelings,” for instance, held particular interest.

The book includes illustrations to flesh out the history as well, and this is much to the work’s credit.

If one is looking for an engaging biography of Hawthorne, then this would be the only one I have chanced upon that I can recommend. As an educational historian, it held my interest and truly fleshed out the life and experiences of Hawthorne in a manner that interested me in his life like no other work had before. While he still is not my favorite author from the period, Wineapple definitely captures the time and the encounters of the author.

[Karen Adkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

For people who, like me, do not enjoy the trend in biographies of doorstop-sized books that document signs of genius in even the most trivial detail of a life (Ray Monk's bio of Wittgenstein started this off), Brenda Wineapple's biography will be a treat. It's thorough but not exhaustive, treats his literature and his life seriously without reducing either to the other, and puts him in the context of his times without falling victim to either anachronism or antiquarianism. It also has the virtue of being very well written.

[Carol Strickland · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took him quite a while to find his subject and style, but he persevered until writing The Scarlet Letter. In contrast to the Transcendentalists, like his friends Emerson and Thoreau, Hawthorne (and his buddy Melville) were more like Puritans in their suspicion of innate depravity.The book is well researched and well written, very helpful in my ongoing project of understanding the literary giants of 1850s America.

[Kimberly Moses · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly comprehensive...this is not a fast read, and Winapple is very complex writer. The life of Nathaniel Hawthorne is an engaging read. What I loved best is the knowledge that he lived and wrote at the same time of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe and others great writers of American Literature. Reading the book, you must invest the time and total concentration, there is so much to ingest.

[Kasey · Rating 2 out of 5]

A better read for researchers

This book does have a lot of information in it about Hawthorne, but it wasn't super interesting. The writing with dense and academic, making it a tough read for people just mildly interested in Nathaniel Hawthorne and looking for a casual read. Researchers of Hawthorne would definitely benefit from this book, but it's not a read for pure pleasure.