Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of adultery and betrayal in colonial America, The Scarlet Letter, is published.
Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. Although the infamous Salem witch trials had taken place more than 100 years earlier, the events still hung over the town and made a lasting impression on the young Hawthorne. Witchcraft figured in several of his works, including Young Goodman Brown (1835) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), in which a house is cursed by a wizard condemned by the witch trials.
After attending Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he began his career as a writer. He self-published his first book, Fanshawe (1828), but tried to destroy all copies shortly after publication. He later wrote several books of short stories, including Twice Told Tales (1837). In 1841, he tried his hand at communal living at the agricultural cooperative Brook Farm but came away highly disillusioned by the experience, which he fictionalized in his novel The Blithedale Romance (1852).
Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody in 1842, having at last earned enough money from his writing to start a family. The two lived in a house called the Old Manse, in Concord, Massachusetts, and socialized with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Branson Alcott, father of writer Louisa May Alcott.
Plagued by financial difficulties as his family grew, he took a job in 1845 at Salem’s custom house, where he worked for three years. After leaving the job, he spent several months writing The Scarlet Letter, which made him famous.
In 1853, Hawthorne’s old college friend, President Franklin Pierce, appointed him American consul to England, and the family moved to England, where they lived for three years. Hawthorne died in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in 1864.
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A story about a morality and culture incomprehensible to most Americans today.
Yeah, now they go on Maury 10 times to find out ‘who’s the daddy’. “Talk shows”– pffft.
What the modern world is completely lacking.
Morality, honor and shame.
When you can open your eyes and see the world as a corpse, you will also see the Kingdom.
Little is said about the Man that screwed Her.
As Bill Cosby said on one of his records.
It is not the Mans fault.
It is the fault of the one who last had It.
What would the world do without religious zealots imposing their morality on others?
Dated a very uninhibited high school senior when I was a freshman in college; a couple of us roomies had gone pheasant hunting-it was s a blind date, no less. Wow! She came to visit me the following summer. Double Wow!
That fall she went off to college, which was kind of a mystery, as she was not much of a student. We wrote once in a while and then came the big one: she was PG. Never heard from her again; I guess she did not care for my soothing words. (Should have thanked my lucky stars she didn’t try to pin it on me, though the calendar was not in her favor).
The irony: I had read “The Scarlet Letter” for English class a few years before; though her name was not Heather it did begin with “A”-for some reason I always linked her letter “A” name to Heather’s letter “A” in the book, though it was not a perfect parallel. Saw a picture of her in her obituary-was amazed after all those years the resemblance to her wild youth was still there. It said she loved her garden and her grandchildren. And no, I was not in divinity school.