Nathaniel Hawthorne
1804–1864 · United States
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
Peak-work percentile in the canon.
The lineage through Nathaniel Hawthorne
Drew From(2)
who shaped Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Hawthorne points you straight here — Chillingworth's eyes are likened to "that ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful door-way in the hillside"
- The Pilgrim's Progress taught Hawthorne to make the soul visible: sin, guilt, and grace rendered as things you can see and name
- Read Bunyan first and the scarlet A reads as what it is — an allegory wearing a novel's clothes
via The Gospels
- The Scarlet Letter is built on Gospel ground — Hester's pillorying reworks the "cast the first stone" scene, and Dimmesdale's scaffold is staged as a Golgotha
- Pearl is named straight out of Matthew 13's "pearl of great price," a phrase Hawthorne quotes verbatim
- The novel's whole grammar of sin, judgment, and grace comes from The Gospels standing behind it
Inspired(2)
who Nathaniel Hawthorne shaped
- Melville met Hawthorne in August 1850, mid-composition, and the encounter changed everything — the seafaring tale he was writing became Moby-Dick
- He poured out his admiration in the rapturous essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses" and a letter thanking Hawthorne for dropping "germinous seeds" into his soul
- Then he made it permanent: Moby-Dick is dedicated to Hawthorne "in token of my admiration for his genius"
- James studied Hawthorne closely enough to write a whole book on him in 1879 — his only book-length study of a novelist — then wrote The Portrait of a Lady two years later
- Hester Prynne's trapped, morally fraught heroism is the template James inherits for Isabel Archer
- The forest scene where Hester begs Dimmesdale to flee echoes forward into Isabel's final choice: escape with the free man, or return to a punishing marriage
Famous Quotes
“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
“It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.”
“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”
“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”
About Nathaniel Hawthorne
American novelist and short story writer, a major figure of American Romanticism. The Scarlet Letter, his masterpiece, explores sin, guilt, and hypocrisy in Puritan New England. A descendant of Salem witch trial judges, he was haunted by his ancestors' legacy. His dark, allegorical fiction probes the moral shadows of American life.