Hawthorne

Mercurial and Double-Edged as His Writing, Nathaniel Hawthorne stands before us as a strangely modern figure -- darkly handsome, obsessed with family secrets and guilt, self-conscious, charismatic, a man of endless complexity, and an artist of incomparable genius. His intimates included Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Franklin Pierce -- yet even among his closest friends he remained elusive.

Brenda Wineapple is the author of <i>Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner</i> and <i>Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein</i>. She is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and twice a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also a fellow of the New York University Institute for the Humanities and the Washington Irving Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies at Union College. Her essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in many publications, among them <i>The American Scholar, </i>the <i>New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, </i>and <i>The</i> <i>Nation</i>. She lives in New York City.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>