NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864), an American novelist and short story writer, 19th century, wrote over 46 novels, short stories and sketches, although his reputation as a novel writer came very late, when he was approximatively 46 years old. Hawthorne is known today for his reference novels written in between 1850 and 1860, namely: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). A precursor of the psychological novel and of modern psychoanalysis, through the deepness of the introspection and the exploration of the soul’s cinematic resources, Hawthorne depicts the American imagination using the 'romance' literary genre, which allows him an allegoric and symbolic approach as analysis benchmarks of the human soul. The author is distinguished by the idealist romantic wing and from transcendentalism, whose optimism and exaggerated idealism he rejected. His inclination towards moral ambivalence and psychologic introspection and the approach of the organic theory concerning life’s duality made him reconsider the role of the individual in puritan society, appreciating the value of the human effort before Providence.