From The Cambridge Biographical Dictionary
Hawthorne, Nathaniel

male

(1804--64)

Novelist and short-story writer, born in Salem, MA. Educated at Bowdon College, he shut himself away for 12 years to learn to write fiction. His first novel was amateurish, but later some of the stories gained favourable notice from the London Athenaeum , and a volume of them, Twice-Told Tales , was published in 1837. His first major success was the novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), still the best known of his works. Other books include The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Snow Image (1852), and a cam paign biography of his old schoolfriend, President Franklin Pierce, on whose inauguration Hawthorne became consul at Liverpool (1853--7). Only belatedly recognized in his own country, he continued to write articles and stories, notably those for the Atlan tic Monthly, collected as Our Old Home