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Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the American novelists who emerged in the Romantic Era. He is a short-story writer who turned to novels in the middle of his career who produced classic examples in each form, including the short stories “Young Goodman Brown” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and the novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables.

Hawthorne’s studies of evil often coincide with his studies of religion, particularly Puritanism, which his ancestors in Salem practiced in the 17th century. Like his two famous contemporaries, Hawthorne also made extensive use of symbols. His scarlet letter ranks alongside Melville’s white whale and Poe’s pit and pendulum, and symbols play important roles in all of his important short stories, including “The Birthmark,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” Furthermore, Hawthorne’s works often hint of the supernatural, the unreal, or the uncommon. Hawthorne might have spoken for both Melville and Poe when he wrote in his introduction to The House of the Seven Gables that the “romance,” a word he used to contrast his form of long fiction from the novel, may “present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.” The romance writer, he explains, may “mingle the Marvellous” in his work. Hawthorne sometimes used the metaphor of everyday objects seen in moonlight to explain the material of the romance. In “The Custom-house,” an essay that precedes The Scarlet Letter, he writes that the atmosphere of a parlor at night suggested to him the world of romance–a region between reality and imagination. The ordinary objects he sees there “are so spiritualized by the unusual light, that they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect.” Finally, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe all reacted against the major literary and philosophical movement of the day, Transcendentalism. Hawthorne, for example, tried to live at Brook Farm, a community experiment begun by some Transcendentalists, but was repelled by what he perceived as hypocrisy and excessive idealism–flaws he chronicled in his roman á clef about the experience, The Blithedale Romance.

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