"Cliff Notes - House of Seven Gables" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: THE AUTHOR AND
HIS TIMES


In our late teens, many of us have to make career decisions.
Will we prepare to be engineers, ballet dancers, composers,
professional athletes, fashion designers? Nathaniel Hawthorne
at age 17 was at that very crossroads of his life.

In a letter to his mother, written in 1821, Hawthorne ruled
out joining the clergy ("Oh, no, mother, I was not born to
vegetate forever in one place and to live and die as calm and
tranquil as a puddle of water"). Becoming a lawyer didn't seem
to be a wise choice either ("...one half of them are in a state
of actual starvation"). And as to medicine, Hawthorne could not
contemplate making a living "by the diseases and infirmities of
my fellow creatures." Instead, he tentatively suggested, "What
do you think of my becoming an author and relying for support
upon my pen?"

We don't know how his mother responded, but the millions of
readers who have enjoyed Hawthorne's work are pleased, no doubt,
that he pursued his goal, ultimately taking his place as one of
the leading figures in all of American literature. In addition,
Hawthorne is seen today as a writer of great influence on
subsequent generations of storytellers. The effect of
Hawthorne's creation of isolated and withdrawn characters, and
his probing of the psychology that led to their alienation, may
now be seen in the novels of such various writers as Henry
James, William Faulkner, Albert Camus, and Robert Penn Warren.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts,
a city already infamous in American history for its campaign in
the 1690s against "witches." In The House of the Seven Gables,
Hawthorne uses references to Salem witchcraft in his examination
of the forces that motivated some of the characters in his
novel.

Young Hawthorne had a slight limp that hindered him enough to
keep him from engaging in sports, and so he turned to
reading--showing a special fondness for William Shakespeare, the
English poet John Milton, and the novels of the French writer
and philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. This interest in
literature later led to his rejection of other possible
professions in favor of becoming a full-time writer.

After graduating from Bowdoin College, in Maine, at the age
of twenty-one, Hawthorne returned to Salem, and for the next
twelve years he lived there in relative seclusion. He had made