Hawthorne's life for the twelve years which followed graduation explains why he later referred so bitterly to his "cursed habits of solitude." The household to which he returned from Bowdoin was almost utterly unsocial. His mother's way of life had been adopted by his two sisters as well. The four members of the family--one is tempted to refer to them as "inmates"--saw very little of each other as the days went on. The young author neither gave nor received open sympathy. His writing, done in solitude, was not read to the rest. Conditions would have been sufficiently abnormal if he had daily come back to this sort of negative family experience from busy activity in the outer world, but of the outer world he knew nothing. Not twenty people in all Salem, he said, were even aware of his existence. If he left the house during sunlight hours, it was to take long walks in the country. He swam in the near-by sea before the town was stirring; he walked the streets in the shadows of evening. His vital energy was drawn from reading and was vented on his own manuscripts. His writing during these years was done with patient persistence and without any reward of applause from the public. His first novel, "Fanshawe," was published in 1828 at his expense, was a failure, and was subsequently suppressed--as far as the discouraged author could recover the copies issued. From 1829 to 1836 _The Token_, an annual put out by S. G. Goodrich of Boston, was his main channel of publication, taking in these years about twenty-five stories and sketches. Through Goodrich he had also found a market for his wares in the _New England Magazine_, and toward the end of the period in the _American Monthly Magazine_ of New York, and, best of all, with the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, which was the periodical embodiment of the Irving tradition and point of view. But though he was not unsuccessful in getting his work into print, he enjoyed no reputation from it, for only a few discriminating critics took any notice of it, and none of these was fully aware of the author's output, since he wrote not under one but under several pseudonyms. The lack of wholesome human contact either at home or abroad told inevitably on Hawthorne's nerves and temper--he had become abnormally thin-skinned--and resulted in the touch of querulousness which the student finds from time to time in his accounts of himself. And it also resulted in the deep self-distrust and discouragement which grew steadily on him. "I have made a captive of myself," he wrote finally to his old college classmate, Longfellow, "and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself out,--and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out. You tell me that you have met with troubles and changes. I know not what these may have been, but I can assure you that trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in this world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows."