Episode notes
In his twenties Nathaniel Hawthorne added a W to his surname to distance himself from ancestors who included a harsh Puritan magistrate and an unrepentant judge at the Salem witch trials. This episode follows the boy who lost his sea captain father to yellow fever at age four, spent over a year bedridden after a mysterious leg injury, ran wild in the Maine woods, and then coasted through Bowdoin College alongside Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce.
After paying to publish an anonymous first novel that flopped so badly he hunted down copies to destroy, Hawthorne spent roughly twelve years writing in a Salem room he called a dismal chamber, took a soul-crushing job measuring salt and coal at the Boston Custom House, and shoveled manure at the transcendentalist commune Brook Farm to afford marrying Sophia Peabody. We trace how his humiliating political firing from the Salem Custom House and his mother's death fed directly into The Scarlet Letter, why he whitewashed Pierce's campaign biography, and the eerie coincidence of his death in 1864.
- How childhood confinement and Salem's gloom shaped his introspective, detached personality
- Why the Custom House jobs gave him the real-world observation his fiction needed
- How the spoils system turned a government post into a public smear campaign against him
- Herman Melville's admiration and the dedication of Moby-Dick to Hawthorne
- Why loyalty and fatalism led him to downplay Pierce's drinking and stance on slavery