As Hawthorne had no problem telling stories with the supernatural as real, stories where the supernatural has a rational explanation and sometimes giving the reader a good Mind Screw to guess which it was. You'd be forgiven for not knowing what to make of what appears to be endless metaphors in The Scarlet Letter without having read a lot of his short fiction. Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Hawthorne as a romantic straddled this line quite a lot among his short stories.

Historical Fiction: Hawthorne wrote quite a lot of this and as such can serve as a gateway for some aspects of American history glossed over in other arenas.

Hawthorne's initial fame as a writer centered on his originality, nowadays he's most noted for their dark psychological intensity. In between stints of writing, Hawthorne worked as a civil servant, starting as a 'weigher and gauger' at the Boston Custom house and eventually spending four years as the U.S. In addition to his famous novels, Hawthorne was also noted for his short stories collected in Twice Told Tales and Mosses from an old Manse, and he also wrote one rather sanitized biography of Bowdoin College classmate and close personal friend U.S Senator Franklin Pierce, who later became the 14th president of the United States.

Hawthorne was a contemporary of and acquainted with most of the other noted authors of the silver age of American letters, most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville, who dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne. Hawthorne's great-great grandfather was John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions, and Nathaniel is said to have added the W to his name to disassociate himself from his notorious ancestors.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (JВ– May 19, 1864) was a noted American dark romantic writer most noted as the author of The House Of The Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter.

House of seven gables