Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times

"If I were to read only one book about Hawthorne, this might well be my choice" - Malcolm Cowley

In Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, a book that re-creates an age as faithfully as a series of brilliant daguerreotypes, master biographer James R. Mellow shows us America's first great writer (1804-1864) and his contemporaries as living, breathing people.Mellow often draws from Hawthorne's own inimitable letters and notebooks in recounting the long apprenticeship of the handsome,...
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"If I were to read only one book about Hawthorne, this might well be my choice" - Malcolm Cowley

In Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, a book that re-creates an age as faithfully as a series of brilliant daguerreotypes, master biographer James R. Mellow shows us America's first great writer (1804-1864) and his contemporaries as living, breathing people.Mellow often draws from Hawthorne's own inimitable letters and notebooks in recounting the long apprenticeship of the handsome, reclusive young author; his romantic courtship of the frail Sophia Peabody; his stimulating, sometimes unsettled relations with fellow pioneers in the formation of American literature: Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Melville; and later, his acclaim in the dazzling salons of Europe, where he was sought by the ornaments of the age -- the Brownings, Jenny Lind, Fanny Kemble.Hawthorne's times were days of turmoil for a young republic struggling to create a political and cultural life to compare with that of its older European rivals, and at the same time trying to preserve the Union from disastrous civil war. A lifelong friend of the ill-starred president Franklin Pierce, Hawthorne had a political career of his own and was a keen and often caustic observer of the era's great politicians -- among them Webster, Sumner, Buchanan, Douglas, John Brown, and Lincoln -- as well as of the reformers, publicists, and wits of this exciting and complex age.James R. Mellow, known to thousands of grateful readers for his best-selling Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, has here produced an unparalleled panorama of nineteenth-century American intellectual life, and a portrait-in-the-round of one of our most significant and enigmatic geniuses. Not since the work of Van Wyck Brooks and F.O. Matthiessen have we had such a comprehensive and enthralling portrait of the building of American culture.James R. Mellow lives in Connecticut on Long Island Sound, in a Federal-period house built on the plan of the Old Manse in Concord. An art and literary critic, Mellow has written on these and other subjects for such publications as the New York Times. the Chicago Tribune, the New Leader, the New Republic. Saturday Review, Commonweal, and Arts Magazine. His earlier biography, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company, published in 1974, received the acclaim of critics and readers alike. Mellow is currently working on a life of Margaret Fuller, the second in a series of four interlocking biographies of major nineteenth-century figures.