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Overview
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said.
Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.
In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls.
Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.
Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.
Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.
Synopsis
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said.
Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.
In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls.
Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.
Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.
Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.
The New York Times
Brenda Wineapple...is the latest writer to tackle Hawthorne's life and try to distill his shadowy essence. If the attempt is in any way unsatisfactory, it is probably because of something unsatisfactory in the subject's own character; Hawthorne withdraws from the biographer as successfully as he did from his family and friends. But Wineapple is a good storyteller and has created a vivid account of a highly interesting life; she has also managed to communicate, if not to resolve, the man's puzzling contradictions.—Brooke Allen
Editorials
The New York Times
Brenda Wineapple...is the latest writer to tackle Hawthorne's life and try to distill his shadowy essence. If the attempt is in any way unsatisfactory, it is probably because of something unsatisfactory in the subject's own character; Hawthorne withdraws from the biographer as successfully as he did from his family and friends. But Wineapple is a good storyteller and has created a vivid account of a highly interesting life; she has also managed to communicate, if not to resolve, the man's puzzling contradictions.—Brooke AllenThe New Yorker
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ambition was such that he always considered himself a failure. A prude and a mama’s boy, haunted by the fear that writing was not a manly profession, he was ashamed of his fame. Far from being the anti-Puritan that his work suggests, he was an irascible conservative, who believed that women shouldn’t be writers, and who, during the Civil War, horrified his more enlightened peers by displaying equal contempt for North and South. After his death, critics grappled with “the paradox of Hawthorne,” resorting to hydraulic metaphors for his genius: it was overwhelming; it was forced into channels. Wineapple’s take is notable for its plain acceptance of Hawthorne’s contradictions: a student of hypocrisy, he was a resolute Yankee who hated his patrimony.The Washington Post
Much to her credit, Wineapple avoids formulas in her sensitive and even-handed reading of Hawthorne's character. She renders him in shifting lights and shifting circumstances as remote and congenial, taciturn and gregarious, hag-ridden and carefree, but always in the service of his writing. — Justin KaplanPublishers Weekly
One of the great American writers of the 19th century never fully believed in his profession. For Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing was "a source of shame as much as pleasure and a necessity he could neither forgo nor entirely approve," says Wineapple (Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner). He uprooted his family again and again, shuttling between government jobs and the solitary writing life, never fully satisfied with either. His romances were brilliant and powerful, but his own life seemed muted and melancholy. Although he had an impressive set of friends and associates during his early years in New England, he nevertheless led a strikingly reclusive existence; he was neighbors with Emerson and Thoreau in Concord, Mass., classmates with Longfellow and Franklin Pierce at Bowdoin, and a good friend to Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville, but very little is made of these relationships. His friends and associates repeatedly described Hawthorne as enigmatic, a man who loved humanity in the abstract but not in its particulars. Wineapple, too, seems mystified by Hawthorne and his life, insecure about his motives. The biography assumes a reportorial style, presenting conflicting views (of his ambiguous friendship with Melville, of his mysterious death) without putting forth any pet theories or compelling evidence to sway the reader one way or the other. The final years of his life coincided with an incredibly tumultuous period in American history, the Civil War, and Wineapple describes how Hawthorne alienated many Northerners with his proslavery views. One critic described his politics as "pure intellect, without emotion, without sympathy, without principle" and that best captures the essence of Nathaniel Hawthorne as depicted in this biography. 56 photos. (Oct. 2) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.KLIATT
Brenda Wineapple has written the most detailed and accessible life of Nathaniel Hawthorne to date. Published to wide critical praise, Hawthorne begins with the fate of the author's three children. The firstborn daughter, Una, died mysteriously at the age of 33. Rose, the youngest, suffered a terrible marriage, feuded with her siblings, and lost her only child to diphtheria. Julian, the only son, was sentenced to a year and a day in a federal prison in 1912, guilty of defrauding the public, a charge he always denied. Hawthorne's own life was similarly fraught with unhappiness and frustration. Born in Salem to one of the town's leading families, Nathaniel struggled to find a career and financial success. A recluse, he didn't marry until he was 38. He and his wife Sophia suffered from poverty that was from time to time lessened by Franklin Pierce and other school friends. The Hawthornes moved frequently, and at one point they were evicted for non-payment of rent. Wineapple does an excellent job of putting Hawthorne's literary works into the context of his life and of analyzing them. She also presents his attitude toward slavery, an American tragedy he usually ignored. He said after John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry in 1859 "nobody was ever more justly hanged." Sophia Hawthorne thought that "the inferior race were designed to serve the superior—But not as slaves!" Hawthorne was 57 when Fort Sumter was fired on in 1861. He went to Washington, D.C. as a tourist to see the war, and then wrote an antiwar piece for the Atlantic. He died in 1864 at the age of 59. About 50 illustrations accompany the vivid text. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high schoolstudents, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Random House, 509p. illus. notes. bibliog. index., Ages 15 to adult.—Janet Julian