Word: salem
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...life. He was "deep," and brainy enough to see and explore with detachment the dangers, for one of his heritage, in the life of imagination. For generations that heritage had been profoundly Puritan. After his sea-captain father died of yellow fever in Surinam, his mother lived in Salem as a recluse; his uncle, Robert Manning, took charge of Nathaniel's education and alienated the boy thoroughly. He became evasive and apparently indolent, writing in puns and private language to his sisters, even writing invisibly, in skim milk-a trick that later seemed symbolic of some of his tales...
After graduation, at which his classmate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow read a paper on the need for a native American literature, Hawthorne went home to his mother's house in Salem and worked at writing. In nine years he borrowed over 700 books from the Salem Athenaeum, a library whose nucleus men like his father had captured, as privateersmen, from the English. Cantwell has looked up the Hawthornes' library record. He deliberately studied New England, reading among other things the files of Salem newspapers during Hawthorne's lifetime. "The books," Cantwell writes, "provide an almost weekly record...
...quietly listening. He dressed carefully and well. He kept a notebook . . ." From his desk and his books he sallied forth regularly with the notebook to see the world-once, in 1830, taking a trip on the Erie Canal. This was during the summer of a scandalous murder trial in Salem; Cantwell construes Hawthorne's journey as a "flight"-perhaps from the ordeal of giving testimony that might have injured people he knew...
...Freshness of My Heart." Some of the most original and beautiful pages in Cantwell's biography are those devoted to Sophia Peabody, the shy Salem beauty with whom Hawthorne finally fell in love. She was an artist, one of three glowing Peabody girls, and had lived for almost two years on a sugar plantation in Cuba among the gallantries and luxuries of the old Spanish society...
With his marriage in 1842 Hawthorne became ready for his greatest work, The Scarlet Letter, and four years later, after poverty and happiness in Concord and in Salem, he wrote it, grew sick over it, and let it be published in a hurry with the long introductory essay on the Salem Custom House-an essay, then, of political significance and courage-acting as a kind-of "lightning rod" to keep the full shock of his masterpiece from the public. Imagination and the life of Salem had interpenetrated. Wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes: "He has done it, and it will never...