He also was inspired and influenced like different events he experienced in his years, in good ways and bad. While attending, he had class with another famous author, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The two were never very …show more content… One main event that triggered him to begin writing The Scarlet Letter was the election of former president, Zachary Taylor. During this time period Hawthorne was in a hole financially. However, through some connections he got a job being the Surveyor of the Port at the Salem custom house.
Because of this, he was fired from his position in June of As if being fired was not enough, his mother passed away less than two months later. After these two horrible catastrophes, he shut everything else out and began writing The Scarlet Letter.
If he was not fired from his surveyor job, many believe he would not have written this novel, simply because he would not have had the time. Also, if his mother did not pass, it is believed that he would have not had a reason to shut up self out, thus not writing the novel.
At the time before he started writing his novel, he had very little money, and his first daughter was recently born. He needed to write in order to support his family. An early ancestor, William Hathorne, first emigrated from England to America in and settled in Salem, Massachusetts, where he became a judge known for his harsh sentencing. His father, a sea captain, died in of yellow fever while at sea. A leg injury at an early age left Hawthrone immobile for several months during which time he developed a voracious appetite for reading and set his sights on becoming a writer.
With the aid of his wealthy uncles, young Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College from to By his own admission, he was a negligent student with little appetite for study. While attending college, Hawthorne missed his mother and two sisters terribly and upon graduation, returned home for a year stay. Hawthorne ended his self-imposed seclusion at home about the same time he met Sophia Peabody, a painter, illustrator and transcendentalist.
In , the first of their three children was born. With mounting debt and a growing family, Hawthorne moved to Salem. And today, we would lump all of that together and call it fiction, and we would call all of those long pieces of fiction novels. But for Hawthorne, the distinction between a novel and a romance was meaningful. A novel, he says, has to be faithful not just to the possible, but to the probable in the ordinary course of events. A romance deals with the truth of the human heart.
But writers in a romance are free to create the circumstances and manage the atmosphere, turn the lights up or down, enrich and deepen the shadows.
Invention is to be expected. Hawthorne used history in this way. During those twelve years he spent writing, his apprentice years trying to become a writer, he also read a lot, including about the Puritans and his ancestors. This was when he changed his name, when he added the W.
He held the job for a few years until he lost it when there was a change in the administration. Hawthorne published his most well-known work, The Scarlet Letter, shortly after in , bringing him fame and financial relief. In , Hawthorne purchased the Wayside from the Alcotts in Concord. This home was the only house Hawthorne ever owned. William Hathorne was a local judge who earned a reputation for cruelly persecuting Quakers, most notably ordering the public whipping of Ann Coleman in In The Custom-House, an introductory sketch to the Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel criticized both John and William Hathorne, apologized for their actions and asked for the curse to be lifted:.
The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town.
I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor,—who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace,—a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known.
He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were many.
His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him.
So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust!
I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being.
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