NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), a native of Salem, Massachusetts, had the distinction of being born on the Fourth of July. He was graduated from Bowdoin College in the class with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
When a mere boy, Nathaniel was crippled by an accident in playing ball. This led him to a life of quiet and to the companionship of books. His vivid imagination made him fond of inventing stories for the entertainment of his friends. When he began to think of a career it was quite natural that he should turn to literature, and that in looking about him for material he should-choose his subjects-as Irving did-from those stirring scenes of which he had an intimate, almost personal, knowledge many of them of his native town, Salem.
Hawthorne pictured New England as Irving did New Amsterdam. He popularized New England history in the form of stories for children, one of which, Grandfather's Chair, contains "The Boston Tea Party." He wrote a book, The House of the Seven Gables, about the house in which he lived for many years. Soon after he wrote this tale, he wrote The Wonder-Book, a volume of stories about Greek gods and heroes, from which "The Paradise of Children" and "The Golden Touch" are taken. Perhaps the best known of all Hawthorne's works is the volume called Twice-Told Tales. In this book he collected a large number of legends about colonial life in New England and retold them in such a way as to give us one of the best pictures of early American life that we have. Some of them deal with actual events; others are based on legendary matter. But all of them do for early New England life what Longfellow's Hiawatha does for the Indian legends: they preserve the stories and also the spirit of early times. Like Longfellow, Hawthorne was a lover of romance and of the early history of our country. He w wrote in prose, not verse, but is prose is as careful and artistic as Longfellow's verse.