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| Hawthorne: A Life | 
| Author: Brenda Wineapple
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy New: $8.84
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 505142
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 0812972910
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.3
EAN: 9780812972917
ASIN: 0812972910
Publication Date: June 29, 2004
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Product Description
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said.
Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.
In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls.
Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.
Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.
Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Less a literary biography than a thorough portrait of Hawthorne's social circle September 17, 2005
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
Brenda Wineapple's palatable life of Hawthorne breaks little new ground, but its focus is a bit of a departure from the many previous biographies. Throughout, Wineapple concentrates on the author's family, neighbors, associates, career, finances, and politics. Such contemporary celebrities as Emerson, Longfellow, Melville, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Horatio Bridge, James T. Field (Hawthorne's publisher), Horace Mann, and, above all, Franklin Pierce receive as much attention as Hawthorne's fiction.
The portrait that emerges is of a career man struggling to keep his family financially solvent, resisting the emasculating temptation to be a full-time author, and clinging defiantly to the anti-abolitionist Democratic principles shared by Franklin Pierce, the hapless 14th President and Hawthorne's closest friend. While Hawthorne's acquaintances were convinced of his talents, they were dismayed by his (and his wife's) bull-headed political views. His ill-fated alliances and loyalties often cost him salaried jobs, even while they appeared to have little affect on his literary celebrity. (His publisher, for instance, was convinced that a preface honoring Pierce would sink Hawthorne's final book, but "to Field's amazement, the dedication didn't hurt advance sales of 'Our Old Home.'") Nevertheless, among members of Hawthorne's class, a career as an author--especially one who suffered extended bouts of writer's block---was not enough to pay the bills, and his inability to keep a job haunted his family with the threat of poverty until the day he died.
Wineapple is superb at fleshing out Hawthorne's circle of family, neighbors, and friends, but--oddly enough--his literature is pushed to the background. There are certainly ample servings from Hawthorne's letters and journals, and Wineapple is somewhat more attentive to his five novels, especially how they are influenced by his political and metaphysical beliefs (on the one hand) and how their publication impacted his celebrity and finances (on the other). But she seems to have assumed that readers are intimately familiar with his tales and sketches, which, for the most part, are mentioned obliquely and glancingly. For example, a toss-away remark describing a contingent of visitors to a Union military base as "a group of do-gooders, spectators, and enthusiasts straight out of the pages of 'The Celestial Railroad'"--the only significant reference to the story--does little to elucidate or contextualize one of Hawthorne's most searing satires.
As a social biography, then, "Hawthorne: A Life" is largely a success, and Wineapple's colloquial, almost gossip-tinged, narrative makes for easy and pleasurable reading. Readers looking for a more literary biography, however, should hunt down a copy of Edwin Haviland Miller's "Salem Is My Dwelling Place" (published in 1981), which more thoroughly treats the biographical and thematic implications of Hawthorne's fiction.
 An exemplary biography of a preeminent man of letters October 24, 2004
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
This thoughtful and graceful biography of Nathanial Hawthorne cogently captures his human complexity, which in turn reflects the polarities of the American character and experience that he vividly described in his self-styled romances: head and heart, reason and emotion, reality and imagination, materialism and transcendentalism, Puritanism and Quakerism, republicanism and federalism, states' rights and national union, slavery and abolition, heritage and freedom, tradition and independence. Brenda Wineapple's book skillfully chronicles Hawthorne's early and recurrent poverty, peripateticism, Hamlet-like indecisiveness, ambivalence about writing, and tendency to observe rather than to participate in life; and, like a Dickens novel, her work presents the author's family and distinguished circle of friends as fully developed and plausibly motivated characters: Franklin Pierce, Emerson, Melville, and, at a greater remove, Stowe, Whitman, and Poe. This volume's evident scholarship - it contains more than one hundred pages of notes - is expressed in a highly palatable style that is also educative in its unobtrusive use of words sufficiently uncommon (e.g., atavistic, coruscate, metonymic, sodality, solipsistic, treacle) to cause some readers to consult their dictionaries frequently. In sum, this work is the triumphant achievement of an ambitious undertaking.
 Poor Hawthorne August 25, 2004
12 out of 23 found this review helpful
How he'd have loathed this biography by Wineapple. Invasive and outrageously distorted when it comes to interpreting what Hawthorne means in his own biographical entries [especially the letters], this volume commits the primitive biographical sin of reach a verdict, first; find the evidence, second. Some of Wineapple's assertions as to what Hawthorne "really" thinks [often in contradiction to his actual words] are simply preposterous. Thank God for the copious quotings from the great man, himself. The rest? Read quickly; take painkillers.
To Know a Man Too Well June 28, 2004
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
I'm not a big biography reader, so I can't throw out other tomes to compare to this one. All I can say is that it was, amazingly, a page-turner. Wineapple really made me want to know more, and helped me to understand a very, very complicated man, at least as much as it is possible to do so. Obviously meticulously researched, brimming with witty remarks (both Wineapple's and first-person quotes), one of few criticisms I can think of is that the author tried a little too hard to emulate Hawthorne's style, not always transparently. But then, when I read Hawthorne, my sentences tend to grow, too, so maybe that isn't a criticism.Wineapple's only failing, in my opinion, is her tendency to skip over things she seems to assume we already know, like Sophia's fall on the ice precipitating her miscarriage. She neither disproves it nor states it, just ignores it. It made me wonder what else she left out that I didn't know enough to notice. My only other comment is a warning - for those (like me) who have been fascinated by Nathaniel Hawthorne since their first exposure to him, beware - to know the man this well, with this much detail, is to demystify him before adoring eyes. He was a man, it turns out, just a man, with failings and foibles. Some, like his racism and sexism, might be excused by the times he lived in, but others, like self-pity and hubris, are timeless. After this book, I pity him more, and worship him less. But his work, as Wineapple points out in the Notes, remains as popular as ever.
Professor Wineapple deserves an A for her great biography! January 30, 2004
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Hawhthorne the scion of Salem Mass.Puritans was a man who lived his life within his tortured guilt-ridden soul. The great nineteenth century author of such gems as "The Scarlet Letter", "The House of the Seven Gables", "The Blithedale Romance","The Marble Faun" and classic short stories comes vividly alive in this superbly crafted, researched and well written account. Wineapple is that "rare apple": an academic English professor who writes clear prose understandable by the popular reading public.
Hawthorne was a complex man who kept his thoughts interior until he spilled out his concerns on the page. He was a supporter of the Democratic party meaning he was opposed to abolitionism, felt whites were the superior race and had an almost unnatural love for our 14th President Franklin Pierce (one of our worst chief executives!).
Hawthorne's tale includes many interesting folks from his beautiful artistic wife Sophie and her fascinating sister Elizabeth Peabody (who may have been in love with Nathaniel)!
The third Peabody sister wed famed educational reformer Horace Mann.
Hawthorne's children were fascinating from the etheral oldest daughter Una to the troubled Julian to the youngest child Rose who opened the first hospice for indigent cancer patients.
Famed literary stars such as Emerson, Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are players in this story with colorful anecdotes from the pen of Wineapple. The early feminist Margaret Fuller is also discussed with acuity. Herman Melville who was Hawthorne a secretive man is chronciled as his hero worship of the Salem author led him to dedicate Moby Dick to the older man.
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