The Scarlet Letter

small farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts and he became friends with the famous novelist, Herman Melville, who was then writing Moby Dick, which he dedicated to Hawthorne. The period in Lenox was very productive: The Scarlet Letter was followed by The House of the Seven Gables (1851), based on the legend of a curse5 put on Hawthorne s own family by a woman condemned to death during the Salem witchcraft trials; A WonderBook for Girls and Boys (1851), a collection of classic myths retold; and The Blithedale Romance (1852), set in a utopian New England community. In 1852, the Hawthornes returned to Concord. Hawthorne was made consul for the United States in Liverpool. In 1857, when this job finished, the Hawthorne family toured France and Italy, where Hawthorne wrote The Marble Faun (1860), a story about the conflict between innocence and guilt. At the beginning of the American Civil War, Hawthorne travelled to Washington D.C., where he met Abraham Lincoln and other important figures. In 1862 he wrote about his experiences in the essay Chiefly About War Matters. While on a tour of the White Mountains, Hawthorne died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire. He was buried on what is now known as Authors Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. Hawthorne s works belong to romanticism or, more specifically, to dark romanticism and all of them suggest that guilt6, sin, and evil7 are the most natural qualities of humanity. Many of his works, where historical facts are mixed with symbolism and psychological themes, are inspired by Puritan New England. 5. curse: words that cause trouble or harm. 6. guilt: what one feels when he commits a crime or an offence. 7. evil: opposite of good. Salem.