Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts; his birthplace is preserved and open to the public.[2] William Hathorne, the author's great-great-great-grandfather, a Puritan,was the first of the family to emigrate from England, first settling in Dorchester, Massachusetts before moving to Salem. There he became an important member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and heldmany political positions including magistrate and judge, becoming infamous for his harsh sentencing.[3] William's son and the author's great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the judges whooversaw the Salem Witch Trials. Having learned about this, the author may have added the "w" to his surname in his early twenties, shortly after graduating from college, in an effort to dissociatehimself from his notorious forebears.[4] Hawthorne's father, Nathaniel Hathorne, Sr., was a sea captain who died in 1808 of yellow fever in Suriname.[5] After his death, young Nathaniel, his mother andtwo sisters moved in with maternal relatives, the Mannings, in Salem,[6] where they lived for ten years. During this time, on November 10, 1813, young Hawthorne was hit on the leg while playing "batand ball"[7] and became lame and bedridden for a year, though several physicians could find nothing wrong with him.[8]In the summer of 1816, the family lived as boarders with farmers[9] before moving toa home recently built specifically for them by Hawthorne's uncles Richard and Robert Manning in Raymond, Maine, near Sebago Lake.[10] Years later, Hawthorne looked back at his time in Maine fondly:"Those were delightful days, for that part of the country was wild then, with only scattered clearings, and nine tenths of it primeval woods".[11] In 1819, he was sent back to Salem for school and sooncomplained of homesickness and being too far from his mother and sisters.[12] In spite of his homesickness, for fun, he distributed to his family seven issues of The Spectator in August and...