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

a personal commitment to the literary life and spent that famous
hibernation time developing his craft. Hawthorne had no regrets
about investing that much time in honing his skills: "If I had
sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard
and rough... and my heart might have become callous by rude
encounters with the multitude. But living in solitude till the
fullness of time was come, I still kept the dew of youth with
the freshness of my heart."

Hawthorne was drawn out of his long isolation when he fell in
love with Sophia Amelia Peabody, of Salem. Before they were
married in 1842, he spent six months at Brook Farm, a commune
outside Boston that attracted people who were in search of a
utopian society. There he talked with such intellectuals as
Henry David Thoreau (both men had a great deal in common since
they enjoyed solitude and simplicity) and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Brook Farm was just one expression of the liberal spirit of
the times. Under Emerson, The Transcendentalist Movement tried
to change the way people thought about themselves. The
Transcendentalists believed that people are basically good and
ultimately perfectible. They believed communion with nature,
reading literary classics, and studying Eastern religions were
important elements in elevating the human condition. Thoreau,
also a Transcendentalist, chronicled his own experiment in
returning to nature at Walden Pond.

Following his marriage, it became important for Hawthorne to
earn a living. He used political influence to get a job as the
surveyor for the port of Salem, but lost his position in the
Customs House there when the Democrats were voted out of power
in 1849. At the time, the mood in America was generally liberal
and optimistic. Railroads and the telegraph reached widely,
effectively shrinking the size of the country. Momentum was
building in the Abolitionist movement to free the slaves.
People looked to the future with excitement.

Hawthorne, however, was preoccupied with the past. In one
way, at least, he was closer to the Puritans in spirit. Instead
of believing that man was perfectible, he felt that evil would
exist as long as the human heart existed. And so it was
difficult for him to share in the expectations of a "new" world
when what he saw was the past visiting its sins upon the
present.

In 1850, Hawthorne's classic tale of sin and retribution, The
Scarlet Letter, was published and met with great success. The
story of Hester Prynne, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and
Roger Chillingworth was set in the gloomy atmosphere of Puritan
New England and was embellished with dark, psychological