Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the major American novelists and short stories writers. He began his writing career by publishing tales and sketches thorough The Token, the New EnglandMagazine, the Salem Gazette, The North American Review, and Atlantic Monthly under his pseudonym or sometimes anonymous. Then, he gathered those tales and sketches which were published periodically over ten years into collections. The first volume, The Twice Told Tale, was published in 1837. He was known for the dark romantic writing style, which primarily concerned with darkness in human nature, sin, and self-destruction. For instance, a short story in this genre is The Birth-Mark (1846), which showed a deep psychology dealing with and sharp symbolism between God and Science. His dark romanticism was influenced when he joined the transcendentalist community, which he did not agree with the perfectionist beliefs. Therefore, his works reflected the negative perspectives of transcendentalism and often opposed to transcendentalist beliefs.
Hawthorne was born in July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. While he attended Bowdoin College, Maine in 1821, he became friend of the future U.S. President Franklin Pierce. After graduated in 1825, he continued his writing in Salem and published his first work, a novel Fanshawe, in 1828. Hawthorne worked at a Boston Custom House as a measurer in 1840, and this working experience had an influent to his later work, The Scarlet Letter (1850), the well known masterpiece of him and of American literature. Two years later, he married with Sophia Peabody, and moved to live in the Old Manse in Concord, and started his happy life with three children. At age 60, while travelling, Hawthorne died in sleep on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire.
During his lifetime, he produced under a dozen of a novel, but he was prolific in writing short stories. Hawthorne's highest regarded short stories include My Kinsman, Major Molineaux (1832), Young Goodman Brown (1835), The Minister's Black Veil (1836), and Feathertop (1852).