With the publication of Twice-Told Tales in 1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne gained recognition as an important American author; “a new star rises in the heavens, ” declared his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in a review of the book. Some thirteen years later, with the publication of The Scarlet Letter (1850), Hawthorne joined the ranks of America's greatest writers. “None but a man of true genius and a highly cultivated mind could have written it, ” declared a typical contemporary review. “It is a work of rare, we may say of fearful power. ” During the 150 years since the publication of his masterpiece, Hawthorne has continued to occupy a central place in the American literary canon despite major shifts in critical fashions and reading tastes. Although recent scholarship has revealed the ways that influential friends, editors, and publishers assisted in the construction of Hawthorne's literary reputation, his short stories and novels continue to speak to a reading public fascinated by stories of sin and guilt and by exceptional individuals struggling with themselves and repressive institutions. Hawthorne's famous moral ambiguity, his rich visual imagination, his deep exploration of the dreamscapes of individuals, communities, and the nation, and especially his “power of blackness, ” as Melville called it, are distinguishing features of his achievement and help explain his durability as an American classic author.

The vast critical commentary devoted to Hawthorne's writings throughout the twentieth century provides ample evidence of the strength and diversity of his appeal. In Our Old Home (1863), Hawthorne relates the effect of gazing upon the Cathedral of Lichfield, which becomes “a kind of kaleidoscopic mystery, so rich a variety of aspects did it assume from each altered point of view, ” and the same can be said about many of his works. With each new critical perspective, a new aspect of his writings has come into view. Psychoanalytic critics, for example, long ago noticed and praised the depth and acuity of his studies of hidden sin. Countless New Critics have discussed the artfulness of his structural patterns and the brilliance of his symbolism, irony, and narrative techniques. Literary historians have traced his major contributions to the genres of the short story and the American romance. And feminists have observed and continue to debate the implications of his treatments of victimized women.

In the last fifteen years of the twentieth century, as Leland S. Person points out in his chapter, “Hawthorne and History, ” an abundance of New Historicist scholarship has focused attention on Hawthorne's engagement with contemporary social and political contexts, and the result has been a more worldly Hawthorne than the Great Artist admired and explicated so well by the New Critics. Readers have been made aware of the subtle ways in which Hawthorne's writings respond to his own times as they draw upon the past. The Scarlet Letter, for example, though set within the Puritan world of seventeenth-century Boston, reacts to a number of mid-nineteenth-century developments, such as the European revolutions of 1848, the Women's Rights Movement, and the growing controversy over slavery in the United States. The novel, in other words, is product and producer of the culture surrounding it.

Brenda Wineapple, in her brief biographical sketch, points out that Hawthorne's life was marked by opacity and ambivalence, which are also key features of his writings. He was a wily man, prone to concealment, duplicity, and flight, yet he could also be openly aggressive, hostile, and contentious, especially when responding to threats to his livelihood or the well-being of his family and friends. His wife, Sophia, long considered the ideal Victorian “angel in the house, ” was also “a mighty woman, ” as Wineapple shows, often critical of others and adept at asserting her will. Although Hawthorne was attracted to and identified with strong women, his fiction often subjects them to humiliation, suffering, and death, and, as Wineapple explains, here, too, ambivalence is the key: he “wrote compellingly of a feminism that attracted and repelled him. ” Not coincidentally, the woman with whom Hawthorne experienced the most conflicted relationship of his life, Margaret Fuller, was the leading feminist of the age.

Women's rights, however, was but one of many reform movements, known collectively as the “Newness, ” that surrounded and stimulated Hawthorne in antebellum America. During his lifetime (1804–1864), which spanned the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States transformed from a small, slowpaced agricultural nation into a rapidly growing, competitive, urban, industrialized one, and these changes were accompanied and challenged by a host of religious and social reform movements, including millennialism, transcendentalism, associationism, mesmerism, spiritualism, vegetarianism, temperance, and abolitionism. Hawthorne studied many of these movements closely and discerned their weaknesses, which he most often at tributed to fallible human nature—as in “Earth's Holocaust” (1844)—yet he was often appreciative of the spirit that impelled them, sometimes sharing it himself. As a young man, he thought for a time about joining the Shakers (a utopian religious sect known for its emphasis on celibacy and chastity); he subscribed to many of the tenets of transcendentalism (especially the belief that nature is the symbol of spirit); and he joined the utopian Brook Farm community at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, devoting himself for a time to the success of the project, though he was certain it would fail. Later, in works such as “The Celestial Railroad” (1843), “The Hall of Fantasy” (1843), and The Blithedale Romance (1852), he satirized reformers and reform movements, including a utopian commune based on Brook Farm.

Hawthorne's world was distinguished from ours not only by the “Newness” but also by its relatively small size and rural character. Although the United States would establish itself as a powerful, industrial nation during the course of the nineteenth century, when Hawthorne was born in 1804, its total population was only some 6 million (compared to 281 million in 2000), and 90 percent of Americans lived on farms (compared to 25 percent in 2000). His college class at Bowdoin had only 38 students; his entire college 108. Most of the population of the young nation was concentrated on the eastern seaboard, looked across the Atlantic for models in literature and art, and considered the “West, ” which was Ohio, Illinois, and the Great Lakes region, a primitive, uncivilized place.

Like a number of his artistic contemporaries, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Longfellow, and Melville, Hawthorne felt the need to achieve American literary independence from England and to establish an indigenous literature worthy of comparison with the tradition of Shakespeare, Milton, and the immensely popular Sir Walter Scott. Soon after the War of 1812, editors and authors began to urge the use of American history and legend as a means of establishing a national literature, and Hawthorne, responding to this suggestion, read widely in New England history during his years of literary apprenticeship. His interest in this history was enhanced by the roles his ancestors had played in it. His great-grandfather John Hathorne, for example, had been one of the judges in the infamous Salem witchcraft trials, and Hawthorne's treatment of the complexities of witchcraft in stories such as “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) thus combines national and familial regard.

While living in Salem after graduating from college in 1825, Hawthorne occasionally walked to a particular barren elevation on the western side of town known as Gallows Hill, where nineteen persons had been executed as a result of the witchcraft trials in 1692. Although a sense of Satan's presence had receded into the past by the 1820s and '30s, belief in the power of the supernatural had not. The eighteenth-century enlightenment (best represented in America by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine), had ushered in the secularization of American culture, but superstitions persisted, even for college-educated men such as Hawthorne. Ghosts, specters, and haunted houses still constituted a very real feature of American life, and in April 1842, Hawthorne himself saw a ghost in the Boston Athenaeum for several days, an apparition of Dr. Thaddeus Harris. Later, during 1842–46, when he lived at the “Old Manse” in Concord with his new wife, Sophia, they felt the presence of a ghost in the house. One night, it even touched Sophia as she lay in bed with her husband. “I am still incredulous, ” he wrote in September 1858, while in Florence, “both as to the Doctor's ghostly identity and as to the reality of the mysterious touch. ”

Many of the pseudosciences, such as mesmerism, spiritualism, physiognomy, phrenology, and homeopathy, which rose to popularity in the antebellum period, captivated Hawthorne's interest and shaped his fiction. As Samuel Chase Coale points out in his chapter, “Mysteries of Mesmerism: Hawthorne's Haunted House, ” mesmerism affected not only the content but also the method of Hawthorne's writings. Coale traces the history of mesmerism from its beginnings in eighteenth-century France through its popularization in the United States in the 1830s to its metamorphosis into spiritualism in the 1850s. For Hawthorne, mesmerism was a dangerous practice, which allowed one person to violate the soul of another, and he gave a number of the villains in his works the ability to induce mesmeric trances. Matthew Maule's powers as a mesmerist, for example, are central to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and Coale argues that Hawthorne himself sought through his own narrative techniques to mimic the mesmerist and ensnare the reader in “a kind of dark trance, ” knowing full well this made him, too, “a kind of spiritual villain. ”

Perhaps the one institution that changed the most in antebellum America, even more than religion and science, was the middle-class family. The emerging market-centered economy, characterized by booms and busts, had transformed the family, creating new divisions of labor and the belief that men and women had been assigned, by God, to separate spheres: the masculine marketplace and the femininized home, respectively. In prerevolutionary America, the family had been a public institution engaged for the most part in farming and home manufacturing, but during the first decades of the nineteenth century, it became a private institution centered upon marital companionship and the care of children.

The fragility and brevity of life focused considerable attention on death and mourning, particularly when children were stricken. In 1804, when Hawthorne was born, life expectancy was only thirty-eight years for men, forty for women, compared to seventy-three and eighty in 2000, and one out of every eight infants died during birth. Families became increasingly smaller throughout the nineteenth century; family size, which averaged more than seven in 1800, dropped to about five by 1850, in part because children had become economic burdens rather than assets. As the nature and size of the family altered, the value it placed on individual children increased, stimulated by a new romantic sensibility. The child, Wordsworth wrote, came into the world “trailing clouds of glory, ” and many Americans acted upon this belief. . .