Essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne

July 4, 1804

May 19, 1864

Novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer

• Twice-Told Tales (1837–1842)
• The Scarlet Letter (1850)
• The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

• “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
• “To do nothing is the way to be nothing.”
• “Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.”

July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale.

“Doctor Heidegger’s Experiment”, “Fanshawe”, “Mosses from an Old Manse”, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”, “The Blithedale Romance”, “The Celestial Railroad”, “The House of the Seven Gables”, “The Marble Faun”, “The Scarlet Letter”, “Twice-Told Tales”, “Young Goodman Brown”.

Much of Hawthorne's work belongs to the sub-genre of Dark Romanticism, distinguished by an emphasis on human fallibility that gives rise to lapses in judgement that allow even good men and women to drift toward sin and self-destruction.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is regarded as one of the greatest fiction writers in American literature. He was a skillful craftsman with an architectonic sense of form, as displayed in the tightly woven structure of his works, and a master of prose style, which he used to clearly reveal his characters’ psychological and moral depths.

“A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.”
“Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
“To do nothing is the way to be nothing.”