Hawthorne: A Life Book PDF, ePub eBook

Join our eBook service for unlimited books & audiobooks. Get a free 7 day subscription! ↓↓↓↓↓


Book Descriptions:
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful, cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was as mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Herman Melville said.

Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposite position. “He always puts himself in his books,” said his sister-in-law Mary Mann, “he cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.

In this major new biography of Hawthorne, the first in more than a decade, Brenda Wineapple, acclaimed biographer of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein (“Luminous”–Richard Howard), brings him brilliantly alive: an exquisite writer who shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst; friend to Emerson and Thoreau and Melville who, unlike them, made fun of Abraham Lincoln and who, also unlike them, wrote compellingly of women, deeply identifying with them–he was the first major American writer to create erotic female characters. Those vibrant, independent women continue to haunt the imagination, although Hawthorne often punishes, humiliates, or kills them, as if exorcising that which enthralls.

Here is the man rooted in Salem, Massachusetts, of an old pre-Revolutionary family, reared partly in the wilds of western Maine, then schooled along with Longfellow at Bowdoin College. Here are his idyllic marriage to the youngest and prettiest of the Peabody sisters and his longtime friendships, including with Margaret Fuller, the notorious feminist writer and intellectual.

Here too is Hawthorne at the end of his days, revered as a genius, but considered as well to be an embarrassing puzzle by the Boston intelligentsia, isolated by fiercely held political loyalties that placed him against the Civil War and the currents of his time.

Brenda Wineapple navigates the high tides and chill undercurrents of Hawthorne’s fascinating life and work with clarity, nuance, and insight. The novels and tales, the incidental writings, travel notes and children’s books, letters and diaries reverberate in this biography, which both charts and protects the dark unknowable core that is quintessentially Hawthorne. In him, the quest of his generation for an authentically American voice bears disquieting fruit.


From the Hardcover edition.

Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple

From reader reviews:

Leticia Simmons:

Do you have favorite book? Should you have, what is your favorite's book? Reserve is very important thing for us to learn everything in the world. Each book has different aim or goal; it means that guide has different type. Some people truly feel enjoy to spend their time for you to read a book. They can be reading whatever they get because their hobby will be reading a book. Think about the person who don't like reading through a book? Sometime, person feel need book if they found difficult problem as well as exercise. Well, probably you will require this Hawthorne: A Life.

Crystal Sanchez:

People live in this new day of lifestyle always make an effort to and must have the time or they will get lots of stress from both way of life and work. So , once we ask do people have spare time, we will say absolutely of course. People is human not really a robot. Then we request again, what kind of activity do you have when the spare time coming to a person of course your answer will certainly unlimited right. Then do you ever try this one, reading books. It can be your alternative with spending your spare time, typically the book you have read is actually Hawthorne: A Life.

Wesley McFarland:

This Hawthorne: A Life is great e-book for you because the content that is certainly full of information for you who also always deal with world and have to make decision every minute. This particular book reveal it details accurately using great arrange word or we can claim no rambling sentences inside. So if you are read the item hurriedly you can have whole information in it. Doesn't mean it only gives you straight forward sentences but tough core information with lovely delivering sentences. Having Hawthorne: A Life in your hand like having the world in your arm, facts in it is not ridiculous 1. We can say that no e-book that offer you world with ten or fifteen moment right but this reserve already do that. So , it is good reading book. Hey Mr. and Mrs. active do you still doubt which?

Jason Scott:

Reading a reserve make you to get more knowledge as a result. You can take knowledge and information originating from a book. Book is prepared or printed or outlined from each source in which filled update of news. In this modern era like right now, many ways to get information are available for a person. From media social such as newspaper, magazines, science reserve, encyclopedia, reference book, book and comic. You can add your understanding by that book. Isn't it time to spend your spare time to spread out your book? Or just trying to find the Hawthorne: A Life when you required it?