Born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1804, Nathaniel Hawthorne lived nearly his entire life there, working as a customs official and author of short stories and novels. Though painfully shy, Hawthorne made friends with several of America’s most prominent voices, including writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville, along with college friend Franklin Pierce, who later became a US president. Hawthorne also enjoyed a long and happy marriage to Sophia Peabody, with whom he had three children.

He was haunted by his family history, which included prominent Puritans—among them, John Hathorne, a harsh Salem Witch Trial judge—and he added a “w” to his last name as a way of distancing himself from his forebears. Hawthorne’s ruminations on sin, guilt, and redemption found their way into his writings, many of which have an eerie quality that place them in the literary tradition of dark romanticism. His most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter, concerns a colonial woman whose unmarried pregnancy hurls her into a confrontation with her community; the story highlights Hawthorne’s concern about injustices women suffered.