Hawthorne

Hawthorne is Henry James's 1879 book-length study of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, written for the English Men of Letters series.

James begins by explaining that the available incidents of Hawthorne's quiet life are too few for a conventional biography. He instead traces the writer's Salem ancestry, New England surroundings, public employment, travels, and literary career as the setting in which the fiction took shape.

The book offers sustained readings of the tales and of novels including The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. James repeatedly asks how Hawthorne transformed a narrow provincial inheritance into romance and moral allegory.

Admiring but never merely reverential, the study is also a revealing statement of James's own ideals. His judgments about Puritanism, realism, and the supposed scarcity of American social material have remained part of the debate around both writers.

"It will be necessary, for several reasons, to give this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography. The data for a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne are the reverse of copious, and even if they were abundant they would serve but in a limited measure the purpose of the biographer."