Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist who could not stop writing about guilt and the way it is inherited. He was descended from John Hathorne, a judge at the Salem witch trials who never repented, and added the w to his name as a young man. He spent twelve years after college in a room in his mother's house in Salem, reading and writing stories he mostly burned. The Scarlet Letter, written in a few months after he lost his customs-house post, made him famous at forty-five. The House of the Seven Gables followed within a year, in what he called the one happy stretch of his life. His subject is never the sin itself but what the community does with it afterwards. He was a friend of Melville, who dedicated Moby-Dick to him, and a college friend of the president who later made him consul at Liverpool.