Born on the Fourth of July in 1804, Nathaniel Hawthorne ranks with Herman Melville, Henry James, and Mark Twain among the best nineteenth-century American male novelists. Hawthorne grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, and Puritan history provided him with the background for many of his later fictional works, such as “The Gentle Boy” (1832), “Alice Doane's Appeal” (1835), “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), “The May-Pole of Merry Mount” (1836), “The Man of Adamant” (1837), “Endicott and the Red Cross” (1838), and of course The Scarlet Letter (actually set in Boston during the 1640s). In this novel of a Puritan community's marking and punishing of Hester Prynne, Hawthorne provided us with a reference point for understanding many twentieth-century examples of scapegoating and social ostracism.

Hawthorne's sea-captain father died at sea when he was only four, and he was raised by his mother and her family, the Mannings. When his mother moved to Raymond, Maine, in 1819, he stayed in Salem with his uncle's family and did not see her for two years. He entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in the fall of 1821 at the age of seventeen. He was not a stellar student. Shortly after his matriculation, he wrote his uncle William that the “Laws of the College are not at all too strict, and I do not have to study near so hard as I did in Salem” (15: 155). Hawthorne did find some rules “repugnant” – especially those involving religion.