Topic: Nathaniel Hawthorne

This fourth of July we celebrate that most American of writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne. A descendant of one of the judges at Salem's infamous Witch Trials, Hawthorne was born on July fourth, 1804, and died less than 60 years later, after an illustrious career in which his Twice-Told Tales, The Scarlet Letter, and The House of Seven Gables helped establish American literature as an entity of its own. Edgar Allan Poe, who did not especially care for Hawthorne's work, nonetheless acknowledged Hawthorne was "one of the few men of indisputable genius to whom our country has as yet given birth."

The title of Hester Prynne's tale, The Scarlet Letter, became a byword for "the scarlet A worn as a punitive mark of adultery," but the effect of Hawthorne's writing is felt beyond sins of the flesh. Consider Hawthorne's marveling at the power of a writer: "Words – so innocent and and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

And in half a dozen words, Nathaniel Hawthorne offered this advice to would-be authors: "Easy reading is damn hard writing." He took a few more words to lay out what he termed "The only sensible ends of writing":, "first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's friends and family; and lastly, the solid cash."

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