Nathaniel Hawthorne is the only nineteenth-century American fiction writer to be considered canonical in both his own time and ours. His many stories and his four full-length romances – The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860) – quickly became part of the accepted answer to the call for an American literature commensurate with the national culture which was developing and defining itself between the American Revolution and the Civil War. That Hawthorne was wary of nationalism and dubious about American culture made him all the more central to the American tradition of endless revision and reform.

As befits an American

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First published 24 January 2005

Citation: Daly, Robert. "Nathaniel Hawthorne". The Literary Encyclopedia. 24 January 2005.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2037, accessed 21 November 2009.]