Nathaniel Hawthorne作者、写作风格及代表作简介

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in a family with a long puritan tradition. He had an ambition to be a writer. In 1821, he went to Bowdoin College, where he had Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as a classmate. He also developed a friendship with Franklin Pierce who was to be the 14th U.S. President. After graduation, he began to pursue his literary career. While, his first attempt at novel writing, a book about his school life, proved to be a failure. His Twice-Told Tales in 1837 and Mosses from an Old Manse in 1846 brought him no great fame either. It was The Scarlet Letter which brought fame and fortune. He tried to evoke emotional sympathy for the heroine, and he got more influence of European literature.

As a romantic writer, his themes are the consequences of pride, selfishness, and secret guilty; the conflict between lighthearted and somber attitude toward life; the impingement of past upon the present; the rutility of comprehensive social reforms; the impossibility of eradicating sin from the human heart; alienation and solitude; nature and natural impulses; unconscious fantasy and dream. His style is writing with romance—the predestined form of American narrative; with a strong fairytale element; the use of imagination; the supernatural with the actual; symbols and setting; narrative interest, ease in transition, coherence, and complexity; soft, flowing, and almost feminine; light touch, somber observation; ambiguity; giving the reader many ways to interpret the story.

The Scarlet Letter is his famous work. The story is simple but very moving. The central event is sin—adultery. It is set in the 17th century. It talks about the heroine Hester Prynne betrays her husband to have an illicit sexual relations with a young clergyman. Bearing on other people's disgusting, Hester makes a positive response the Scarlet Letter A. She does her best to reestablish her fellowship with her neighbors on a new, honest basis and finally wins their love and admiration. The Scarlet Letter is an elaboration of a fact which the author took out of the life of the Puritan past. It is not a praise of a Hester Prynne sinning, but a hymn on the moral growth of the woman when sinned against. The way in which Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter suggests that American Romanticism adapted itself to American Puritan moralism.