THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR

Hawthorne is a vexing figure for any literary biographer—he was so private and emotionally elusive that his own wife, Sophia, considered him a “divine mystery.” Salwak makes a heroic attempt to peek behind that curtain of inscrutability and discover what Hawthorne called the “Inmost Me”—the core of his self that he feared to reveal in his writings. What emerges from his expert labors—he has 45 years of experience studying and teaching Hawthorne and his work— is a magnificently nuanced portrait, one that deftly illuminates both the man and his writing. Born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne felt haunted by what he saw as his “ancestors’ crimes,” a paternal pedigree of violence and intolerance; his great grandfather John sentenced hundreds of women to die during the notorious Salem witch trials. Hawthorne also had his own personal troubles: the early death of his father, also named Nathaniel, and his sister, Louisa; his youthful impoverishment; and the emotional coldness of his mother, Elizabeth. Hawthorne was inclined to become a writer at an early age, and despite profound self-doubt, he would achieve widespread recognition for his talents in his own lifetime. With uncommon interpretive sensitivity, Salwak explores Hawthorne’s works, major and minor, and explicates his preoccupation with human evil, his confrontation with his Puritan ancestry, his Calvinist worldview, and the traumas from his youth that continued to haunt him. Ultimately, the author makes a compelling case that Hawthorne remains relevant today despite the insistence of some that he’s culturally anachronistic: “He speaks powerfully to the central concerns of his time or any time, ours included. He pulls us quite uncynically across deep waters.”

Salwak intends his work to both edify and inspire an interest in his subject, and he writes as if he was preparing a “seminar for a new generation of intelligent college students disillusioned by perfunctory scholarship and unfriendly theories,” as he states early on. However, the study itself is even more engaging, as Salwak furnishes an autobiographical account of his first encounters with Hawthorne’s work as a young man who immediately was enthralled with him—a personal remembrance that affectingly captures the seductive draw of literature. Also, he makes a stirring case against the bowdlerizing of literature to avoid all possibility of offense, asserting that it robs a book of its power. Still, the best aspect of the book is Salwak’s discussion of Hawthorne’s writing and the classic author’s ability to create marvelously deep characters who allow one to enter “into morally agnostic intercourse with another mind.” The author’s discussion of Hawthorne’s most famous work, The Scarlet Letter (1850), as the first psychological novel in America is especially incisive and reveals Hawthorne’s genius for surveying the “ambiguities of moral choice.” Overall, Salwak offers an exciting introduction to an important author that focuses on close textual readings rather than fashionable literary theories.