Nathaniel Hawthorne Signed Document.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was an American novelist and short story writer whose work stands at the dark, brooding center of the nineteenth-century American literary tradition — a writer preoccupied above all others with the moral and psychological legacy of Puritanism, the weight of inherited guilt, and the corrosive power of sin concealed and sin exposed. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, into a family whose roots reached back to the earliest Puritan settlers — one of his ancestors, John Hathorne, had served as a judge during the Salem witch trials of 1692, a fact that haunted Hawthorne throughout his life and to which he added a "w" to his surname in partial repudiation — he spent much of his early adulthood in relative isolation, reading widely and developing the dense, allegorical prose style that would distinguish his mature work. His 1850 masterpiece The Scarlet Letter, set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston and tracing the interlocking fates of Hester Prynne, the Reverend Dimmesdale, and the sinister Roger Chillingworth, is among the most psychologically penetrating novels in the American canon and the work that established his international reputation. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) followed in its wake, extending his meditation on hereditary guilt into a domestic gothic framework, while his short story collections — among them Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) — contain some of the finest allegorical fiction in the language. Herman Melville, who counted Hawthorne among his closest friends and dedicated Moby-Dick to him, wrote that Hawthorne possessed a great, deep intellect which drops down into the universe like a plummet, and that in his soul he was one of the most honest men alive.