{"product_id":"hawthorne-isbn-9780812972917","title":"Hawthorne","description":"Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters.  Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBrenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit. “Clearly the best biography of Hawthorne; \u003ci\u003ethe\u003c\/i\u003e Hawthorne for our time.  Beautifully conceived and written, it conveys the full poignancy and complexity of Hawthorne’s life; it makes vivid the times and people and places — and what a rich array of people and events! A delight to read from start to end.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Sacvan Bercovitch\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brenda Wineapple’s \u003cu\u003eHawthorne\u003c\/u\u003e is, quite literally, an electrifying life. The power and sweep of the writing galvanizes a subject frozen, by earlier biographies, into a series of stills.  We understand, finally, a man and artist torn by every conflict of his time, adding a few of his own, a man both strange and strangely familiar. The great achievement of this stunning biography lies in the feat of restoring Hawthorne to the rich and roiling America of his own period, while revealing him, for the first time, as our contemporary.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Benita Eisler\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“With the possible exception of Herman Melville, no one has ever understood the grand tragic Shakespearian nature of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and work as well as Brenda Wineapple. Her brilliant, powerful, nervy, unsettling and riveting book is authoritatively researched and beautifully written; it has itself the dark mesmeric power of a Hawthorne story. Wineapple's Hawthorne is an intensely private man, compounded of strange depths, mysterious failings, concealments, yearnings and unmistakable incandescent genius.”\u003cbr\u003e                           \u003cbr\u003e--Robert D. Richardson\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brenda Wineapple illuminates Hawthorne's complexities without demystifying the man.  He remains one of the most intriguing American writers: dark, guilty, erotic, and psychologically acute – qualities that Wineapple deftly explores.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Margot Peters\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There is no justice for Hawthorne without the mercy which failed him in life and art.  In Wineapple's new dispensation, all the man endured and the art achieved is revealed by loving scruple and, to awful circumstance, condolent response.  No biographer since James, no critic since Lawrence has limned so unsparing and therefore so speaking a likeness of our first great fabulist, from which one returns to the works with enlightened wonder.  More darkness, more light!  Here both abound.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Richard Howard\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A fine biography...A sensitive reading of Hawthorne’s character...Wineapple makes generous use of a cache of family letters that detail the tangle and tussle of wills that Hawthorne had entered as son, brother, lover, and husband, all the while seeking the freedom of spirit to exercise his genius.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Justin Kaplan, \u003ci\u003eWashington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Meticulously researched and superbly written...captures the novelist in high resolution.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Peter Campion, \u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A vivid account of a highly interesting life.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Brooke Allen, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Richly detailed and nuanced; a model of literary biography and an illumination for students of Hawthorne’s work...A thoughtful and absorbing life.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--\u003ci\u003eKirkus (starred)\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A thoroughly engrossing story of a writer's life… written with novelistic grace and flow, with an eye to the telling detail and apt quotation.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Dan Cryer, \u003ci\u003eNew York\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eNewsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Wineapple is a splendid stylist and a master of concision. She can capture an entire personality and life in a brief paragraph, … She can define a complex amatory relationship in a sentence…. Her eloquent hands bring Hawthorne vividly alive for us.”  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Jamie Spencer, \u003ci\u003eSt. Louis-Post Dispatch\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eBrenda Wineapple\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of seven books including \u003ci\u003eThe Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation\u003c\/i\u003e, selected by a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e book critic as one of the ten best nonfiction works of 2019; \u003ci\u003eEcstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877\u003c\/i\u003e, a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e ‘Notable Book’; and \u003ci\u003eWhite Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson\u003c\/i\u003e, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting, and a Pushcart Prize, she has also received three National Endowment Fellowships including its Public Scholars Award. Her essays and reviews regularly appear in \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e. In 2023, she was selected a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.Chapter One\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Prison Door-Introductory\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones,  and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure  and uncontrollable mischief.\u003cbr\u003eNathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd to make an end is to make a beginning.\u003cbr\u003eThe end is where we start from.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e        T. S. Eliot, \"Little Gidding\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut the past was not dead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNathaniel Hawthorne, \"The Custom-House\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGuilty. He heard the verdict and flinched. The second-born child of  the very famous author had been convicted of defrauding the public, a  violation of section 215 of the United States Criminal Code, in the  matter of the Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Ltd., Julian  Hawthorne, president. Julian's father had written obsessively of  crime and punishment and the sins of fathers visited on sons, and  here he was, the son, sixty-six years old, hair white as sugar, well  known, respected, and guilty-guilty-sitting in a New York City  courtroom, sporting a scarlet tie.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJudge Mayer banged his gavel. Staring straight ahead, Julian frowned  slightly as befitted a man of his stature and his shame. He,  Nathaniel Hawthorne's son, would be imprisoned a year and a day in  the United States federal penitentiary in Atlanta, his term set to  run from November 25, 1912, the day the public trial began.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLikely his personal trials began much earlier. The great name of  Nathaniel Hawthorne will \"always handicap you more or less,\" poet James Russell Lowell had warned. \"To be the son of a man of genius is at best to be born to a heritage of invidious comparisons,\" Henry  James Jr. had acknowledged-and placed the Atlantic Ocean between  himself and his philosopher father. But at least the younger James  wrote fiction, which the elder James did not; comparisons are  especially invidious when the son plies the father's trade, as Julian  did.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut it was even more than that. Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne's  children seemed to spring from one of Hawthorne's tales, incarnating  their father's paradoxes writ large. \"To plant a family!\" Hawthorne  had written. \"This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and  mischief which men do.\" It was as if the past always lay in wait,  just around the bend. The fortunes of each Hawthorne child uncannily  bore out what Hawthorne considered a curse of guilt and grief, of  somberness and what we today call depression, as well as talent,  penury, pluck, and fortitude, all stitched together in a bright  pattern, like Hester Prynne's letter \"A.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHawthorne's firstborn, a daughter, descended directly from literature. Christened Una after Spenser's heroine in The Faerie Queene, she served as the model for Pearl, the precocious child in  The Scarlet Letter, and many observers noticed her resemblance to her  literary father. Like him, she was handsome, tall, exacting, and  remote. \"The more I feel the more it seems a necessity to be  reserved,\" said Una at fifteen. Una had worshipped sorrow, said her  mother, since the age of six. \"It was impossible she should ever be  happy,\" remarked a friend. The sky was too blue, the sun too blazing,  her own feelings too hard to bear. She died mysteriously at the age  of thirty-three.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRose Hawthorne, the youngest Hawthorne child, fared  better-eventually. After the death of both her parents, a horrible  marriage, a feud with her siblings, and the early loss of her only  child to diphtheria, Rose fulfilled the unspoken mission of one of  the characters in Hawthorne's novel The Marble Faun: she takes  communion. As a self-ordained Sister of Mercy, Rose consecrated  herself to the poor and the sick, and at the age of forty-four, in  1896, established the charitable organization Sister Rose's Free Home  (after St. Rose of Lima) to care for indigent cancer patients. In  1899 she received the Holy Habit of the Third Order of St. Dominic,  and two years later, in 1901, the home was incorporated as the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, still extant today in  Hawthorne, New York.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen there was Julian, in the middle. On Easter Sunday, 1913, he was  transported to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The formal charge against him and his cronies was misuse of the United States Postal  Service, a catchall complaint designed to nail the defendants, whose  real offense, according to Judge Mayer, wasn't selling shares in a  worthless silver and iron mine so much as the exploitation of their  recognizable names. \"Theirs is the greater crime,\" spat the New York  district attorney, \"for they have prostituted them.\" The general  counsel for the Hawthorne mines, former mayor of Boston Josiah  Quincy, was cleared of the one conspiracy count against him, but the  neurologist Dr. William J. Morton, whose father had discovered ether  just before the Civil War, went to jail with Julian.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJulian held his head up high. His conviction disgraced neither him  nor his name, he said, just the sleazy people who wished to see  him-for some inexplicable reason-go to prison. What else could he  say? After his sentencing, he briskly strode from the courtroom into  the marshal's office and with remarkable sangfroid pulled out a small  cigarette case, which he pushed toward Morton and the fourth  accomplice, Alfred Freeman, a petty swindler without a fancy name.  Morton stood paralyzed. Freeman circled the room. Hawthorne pocketed  his case and shook the hand of a sympathetic well-wisher. \"In such  extremities,\" he later noted, \"a man's manhood and dignity come to  his support.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut when the deputy marshal clicked a pair of steel handcuffs round  his wrist, Julian blinked in disbelief and with some confusion walked  through the slanting rain to the city jail, a place familiarly known,  à la Hawthorne, as the Tombs. \"I was sure we should be acquitted,\" he  muttered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet by and large the only son of America's most esteemed novelist  maintained a transcendental faith in his own innocence, a trait that  linked him more to his tender, doting mother than to his morally  particular father, who spent a lifetime probing motives, his own most  of all. An epicure of intent, Hawthorne knew what the heart held in  thrall. \"It is a very common thing,\" he wrote near the end of his  life, \"-this fact of a man's being caught and made prisoner by  himself.\" But Julian knew what he was doing when he exploited the  Hawthorne name, which he plainly saw as false. Nathaniel Hawthorne:  to the public it conjured American probity and success; to Julian it  was fraudulent, overblown, hollow at the core.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDissimulation was the keystone of Julian's career. And inadvertent parody of his father. Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing life was short and well crafted; Julian's, an interminable flood: hundreds of  second-rate novels and poems, stories, histories, travel books,  reminiscences, essays, even a two-volume biography of his parents,  all capitalizing on the eminent patronymic. (With spooky foresight,  his father once said of Julian that \"his tendencies . . . seem to be rather towards breadth than  elevation.\") In 1908, when Julian abandoned literature for geology,  as the president of the Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Ltd., he  managed to write hundreds of promotional letters as well as several  promotional books. His energy was amazing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf his father obeyed the Muse, Julian served Mammon. On selling his  first short story, he thought, \"Why not go on adding to my income in  this way from time to time?\" It seemed easy enough. \"I think we take  ourselves too seriously,\" he said of his fellow novelists, and at his  death was credited as one of the first American writers to make  literature \"a bread-and-butter calling.\" When Henry James published  his incisive study of Hawthorne, Julian confided to his diary that  James deserved success \"better than I do, not only because his work  is better than mine, but because he takes more pains to make it so.\"  In public, however, Julian protected himself from James and, more  importantly, from his father's literary scruples. \"I cannot  sufficiently admire the pains we are at to make our work . . .  immaculate in form,\" he declared. Aesthetic niceties are effeminate.  Success is a racket.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBroad-chested and handsome-like his father-and with the same high  coloring and dark wavy hair, Julian was born \"to have ample means,\"  declared his adoring mother. Friends thought she overpraised him, and  that his father hadn't praised him enough. Whatever had happened,  Julian combined his father's cynicism with his mother's ebullience.  He loved women (though he was no feminist), tailored clothes,  abundance, and a good scam. Hawthorne dryly assessed his son's  character; he ought to join a ministry, he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJulian floundered at Harvard, quitting just months after his father's  death, his interests inclining more to sport than study. He  floundered at the Lawrence Scientific School and at the Realschule in  Dresden, where he proposed to study civil engineering with a view  toward knocking together a huge fortune in the American West. This  plan also went awry. Unlike his father, who had delayed his marriage  to Sophia, Julian married at the age of twenty-four and sired ten  children, eight of whom survived. But he never had enough, kept  enough, saved enough, planned enough.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis insouciance exasperated Rose. That he wouldn't accept a pardon  unless William Morton also received one was yet another instance of  his irresponsibility, she told his family. \"But he is he, so to  speak,\" she said, throwing her hands up. Still, Rose mounted a loyal  defense. \"I know that he really believed in the mines,\" she  reportedly told Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson's secretary. To  Julian, however, she starchily observed, \"I am consoled about your  personal trials by knowing that you have always adapted yourself to  deprivations with the unconcern-or, rather, the manly vigor of one of  your remote ancestors.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eComing from Rose, it was an equivocal compliment. She knew their  Puritan ancestors whipped, scorched, hanged, and banished women such  as herself for views far less heretical than hers. Julian too had  disapproved of her vocation, though more amiably than their ancestors  would have. After her death, he remembered Rose as a headstrong girl  prone to egregious errors of judgment. Her errand in Washington,  D.C., on his behalf, was one of these. On April 3, 1913, Mother  Alphonsa, as Rose was known, traveled by train to the nation's  capital to ask President Wilson to pardon her brother.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"What had I to do with 'pardons'?\" Julian was furious. \"Pardon for  what?\" But Rose was determined to restore luster to the Hawthorne  name. A band of white cloth pleated across her forehead and stern  black robes sweeping about her ample figure, she was every bit as  fierce as Hester Prynne and probably just as nervous when she boarded  a humid trolley for the White House. Tumulty received her. Strangely  affected by the pink-cheeked woman in black and white, he ignored  protocol and sent her request directly to the president.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr said he had. Nothing happened. Public opinion was against Julian.  Parole was denied. Not until the following fall, on October 15, 1913,  was Julian Hawthorne released from prison. Again, he wore the scarlet  tie.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRose Hawthorne was born when her father was forty-seven. \"She is to  be the daughter of my age,\" he remarked, \"-the comfort (at least so  it is to be hoped) of my declining years.\" Hawthorne died, however,  just before his sixtieth birthday and the day before her thirteenth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe had called her Pessima. She was mercurial, fastidious,  self-critical, and impatient. Explained Sophia in the double-edged  terms she perfected, \"I think you inherited from Papa this  immitigable demand for beauty and order and right, \u0026amp; though, in the  course of your development, it has made you sometimes pettish and  unreasonable, I always was glad you had it.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRose wanted to write, but her father's interdiction against the literary life put an end to that. In fact, both parents were wildly  ambivalent about the practice of literature, declining to teach their  children to read until they reached the ripe age of seven. Sophia was  adamant about this. \"I have not the smallest ambition about early  learning in my children,\" she declared. And though her two sisters  were educators of note and her brother-in-law, Horace Mann, once the  secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Sophia refused to  hand her children over to schoolmistresses of dubious intent.  Hawthorne deferred to her. \"The men of our family are compliant  husbands,\" his own sister later scoffed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEncouraged to paint by her artistic mother, Rose dutifully studied  art until Sophia's death in 1871, and then she cut loose, sort of.  Barely twenty, she quickly married George Parsons Lathrop, a  twenty-year-old aspiring writer. But if Rose believed she was  replacing her parents by replicating their wonderful marriage-artist  to writer-she was utterly mistaken. \"Love is different from what I  supposed and I don't like it,\" admits a character in one of her short  stories. She did write after all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGeorge Lathrop got a job as assistant editor at the Atlantic Monthly,  the showcase for much of his father-in-law's work, and when he lost  the post he and Rose drifted to New York, where they nibbled at the  edge of the literary set. Often dressed in yellow, her favorite  color, Rose was soon known as a passable if gloomy poet and  indifferent author of short stories, her best production fittingly  called \"Prisoners.\" George, a conventional and reasonably prolific  writer, was known as a drunk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Lathrops converted to Catholicism, but religion didn't help their  failing marriage, and after much soul-searching, Rose separated from  her husband in 1895. Una suspected abuse. Then, in a volte-face that  Julian found \"abrupt and strange,\" Rose chose to rededicate her life  to \"usefulness.\" To Rose, however, it was her father's fine-grained  appreciation of suffering that motivated her. \"He was as earnest as a  priest,\" she said, \"for he cared that the world was full of sorrow \u0026amp;  sin.\" Certainly Hawthorne's last illness had cast a pall over his  youngest child; and in 1887 she was devastated yet again by the  premature death of poet Emma Lazarus, a cherished friend.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis stiffened her purpose once and for all. On May 19, 1898, the  thirty-fifth anniversary of her father's death, she clipped her  auburn hair and stowed the leftover tufts under a linen cap.  Henceforth she dressed in an austere monkish gown. \"I gave up the  world,\" she said, \"as if I were dead.\" She swore off men and earthly  things, and for the rest of her life lived productively in a  community of faithful women. \"From close observation I have learned  something about the true courage of women,\" she had written years  earlier.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer choice reflecting a condition of her parents' lives-intimate  friendships with members of the same sex-Rose started one of the  first hospices in America in a tenement house on Scammel Street on  the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she nursed the dying poor.  Proceeds from a memoir of her father, published in 1897, supported  her in this, and with Alice Huber, a \"life-helper\" (her word), she  opened Sister Rose's Free Home in a three-story red brick building at  426 Cherry Street. Unlike her siblings, Rose managed to remake  Nathaniel Hawthorne's legacy into something of her own. \"","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299702427877,"sku":"NP9780812972917","price":26.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812972917.jpg?v=1767728786","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/hawthorne-isbn-9780812972917","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}