With 1837 the friendship of two college associates, Horatio Bridge, a man of political influence and a large heart, and Franklin Pierce, soon to be the president of the country, began to assert itself. Through Bridge the publication of "Twice-Told Tales" was effected in 1838. Through the influence these men were able to exert, Hawthorne was appointed weigher and gauger in the Boston Customhouse. With this post Hawthorne for the first time entered into active life, yet when he lost it as a result of a change of administration in 1841 he was somewhat relieved at the hardship. His engagement to Sophia Peabody led him next to attempt a living solution through residence and partnership in the Brook Farm enterprise during 1841. Again he was oppressed by having the world too much with him, and in 1842, on his marriage, he settled in the seclusion of Concord for his first residence of something over three years. At the end of this time the needs of his growing family made an assured income imperative, and once more through the political influence at his command he was given a federal office, this time as head of the customhouse at Salem. He held this position, like the one at Boston, until a political reverse took it away from him in 1849. Hawthorne was now nearly forty-six years of age. For the twelve years following the publication of "Twice-Told Tales" he had accomplished almost nothing in creative authorship. The human sympathy and companionship of his marriage, much as it meant to him, was offset as far as authorship went by the distracting need for money. With the loss of the post at Salem the outlook was almost desperate. In the dark hour, however, it appeared that his wife had saved a little from his slender earnings, and in the following months he wrote what appeared, through the friendly insistence of James T. Fields, as his first widely recognized work--"The Scarlet Letter." The first edition of this was exhausted in two weeks. The stimulus of popular attention encouraged him to a rapidity of production wholly out of proportion to anything in his earlier experience. In 1851 "The House of the Seven Gables" was issued; in 1852 "The Blithedale Romance"; and in the meanwhile various lesser narratives were produced. At this stage his political friendships once more proved of value, and through the influence of Pierce, now president, he was enabled to go abroad in the consular service, first to Liverpool and then to Rome. His foreign residence continued until 1860 and resulted, in authorship, in the last of his great romances, "The Marble Faun," the book of English reminiscences, "Our Old Home," and the "Italian Notebooks." With his return to America he went back to Concord, but though he was quite free and undistracted by financial worries, his major period as an author was over, and he died in 1864, leaving behind him only the unimportant stories "Doctor Grimshaw's Secret," "Septimius Felton," and the uncompleted "Dolliver Romance."