Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times

James R. Mellow

In Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, a book that re-creates an age as faithfully as a series of brilliant daguerreotypes, master biographer James R. Mellow shows us America's first great writer (1804-1864) and his contemporaries as living, breathing people. Mellow often draws from Hawthorne's own inimitable letters and notebooks in recounting the long apprenticeship of the handsome, reclusive young author; his romantic courtship of the frail Sophia Peabody; his stimulating, sometimes unsettled relations with fellow pioneers in the formation of American literature: Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Melville; and later, his acclaim in the dazzling salons of Europe, where he was sought by the ornaments of the age -- the Brownings, Jenny Lind, Fanny Kemble. Hawthorne's times were days of turmoil for a young republic struggling to create a political and cultural life to compare with that of its older European rivals, and at the same time trying to preserve the Union from disastrous civil war. A lifelong friend of the ill-starred president Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne had a political career of his own and was a keen and often caustic observer of the era's great politicians -- among them Webster, Sumner, Buchanan, Douglas, John Brown, and Lincoln -- as well as of the reformers, publicists, and wits of this exciting and complex age.