Nathaniel Hawthorne

A Salem judge condemns accused witches to death, and one victim’s husband curses him and his children’s children. Generations later, that curse still shadows the family of a boy named Nathaniel Hawthorne.

In this early twentieth-century biography, George Edward Woodberry traces Hawthorne’s roots through New England’s stern Puritan past to Salem, where Nathaniel is born in 1804. His father dies when he is four; his mother retreats into grief, and a childhood injury leaves him confined for years with the household’s books. In a quiet house haunted by sorrow and an old family curse, the boy finds a world within reading—and learns solitude before he has much company. What did those early shadows awaken in the young reader?

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