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The Scarlet Letter


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             Hawthorne's sensitivity to guilt is clearly present in the Scarlet Letter, as well as some of his other works. Other personal influences reflected in Hawthorne's writing include his love of reading and nature. Hawthorne later joined a transcendentalist community called Brookwood Farm at the urging of some of his writer friends. He eventually left, disillusioned, and joined the ranks of the anti-transcendentalists. Hawthorne married Sophia Amelia Peabody shortly after leaving Brook Farm. This began the happiest period of his life. They had five children, and the love and responsibility of family life had a humanizing effect on him; however, he also had the burden of supporting four other persons on the uncertain income of a writer. It wasn't until the publication of his novel The Scarlet Letter in 1850 that Hawthorne became a well-known writer. The next year he published his second great novel, The House of Seven Gables, along with a book of stories for children called A Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls. (Baym 98) .
             "Nathaniel Hawthorne was a mystery, even to himself,"" says Claudia D. Johnson. And like [Edgar Allen] Poe, he has remained a man of mystery in American literature, whose heart successive biographers have tried to bare, each one with a different expiation [ ] but coming to the conclusion that " his reticence comes from finding no solution to the problems that constantly beset him,"" said McPherson. "Its impossible to comprehend Hawthorne without the Puritan background,"" wrote literary critic Henry S. Canby. Puritanism for him [ ] was a fortress from which he had escaped and was glad to be gone, and yet looked back to as a city fortified and strong in its certainties while [ ] uncertain and weak (Swisher 57). "The Puritan age and its sure morality was an obsession in his life,"" said Canby. .
             In the Puritan Community, man was viewed as innately corrupt and punishment was used as a warning to keep others from straying from morality (McPherson 38).


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