Young Goodman Brown

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Published on 2019-10-22 18:59:07

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, where his birthplace is
now a museum. William Hathorne, who emigrated from England in 1630, was the first of Hawthorne's
ancestors to arrive in the colonies. After arriving, William persecuted Quakers. William's son John
Hathorne was one of the judges who oversaw the Salem Witch Trials. (One theory is that having
learned about this, the author added the "w" to his surname in his early twenties, shortly after
graduating from college.) Hawthorne's father, Nathaniel Hathorne, Sr., was a sea captain who died in
1808 of yellow fever, when Hawthorne was only four years old, in Raymond, Maine. Hawthorne
attended Bowdoin College at the expense of an uncle from 1821 to 1824, befriending classmates
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and future president Franklin Pierce. While there he joined the Delta
Kappa Epsilon fraternity. Until the publication of his Twice-Told Tales in 1837, Hawthorne wrote in
the comparative obscurity of what he called his "owl's nest" in the family home. As he looked back on
this period of his life, he wrote: "I have not lived, but only dreamed about living." And yet it was this
period of brooding and writing that had formed, as Malcolm Cowley was to describe it, "the central
fact in Hawthorne's career," his "term of apprenticeship" that would eventually result in the "richly
meditated fiction."

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