Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of a judge at the witch trials, and the Puritan past of New England was the lifelong subject of his fiction. After Bowdoin College, he spent a dozen years writing in his mother's house, producing the tales collected in Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse. Work in the Boston and Salem custom houses supported his family until The Scarlet Letter in 1850 made his name; The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance followed, and The Marble Faun after years as consul in Liverpool.