In all the most obvious ways Hawthorne's literary output was a fruit of his peculiar heritage and surroundings and his consequent manner of life. A reading of his "American Notebooks," the product of the late 30's and the 40's, reveals how definite was the preparation for the harvest to come. It was the gift of Hawthorne's imagination to shroud with a kind of unreality characters and backgrounds that were drawn from close observation. His interpretation made them his own, though they were evidently derived from the life about him. This process is in utter contrast, for example, with the invention of Poe. There never were such individuals as Arthur Gordon Pym or Monsieur Dupin or Fortunato or Roderick Usher. They are essentially human, but they belong to no time or place. But Arthur Dimmesdale, Jaffrey Pyncheon, Hollingsworth and Kenyon, Hester, Phoebe, Zenobia, and Miriam were portraits, made in the image of people who had walked the streets familiar to Hawthorne. Poe's settings are convincingly real. One can visualize every detail of the City in the Sea or the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, although one realizes that they never existed in fact; but Boston, Salem, Brook Farm, and Rome supply actual backgrounds for Hawthorne. Had the Puritans builded as securely as the Romans, "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and "The Blithedale Romance" could be illustrated--as "The Marble Faun" often has been--from photographs of surviving structures. Again, these actual scenes and people were put into stories for which there were historical bases, and the symbols around which they were constructed--like the letter of scarlet and the many-gabled house--had been seen and touched by the author. The Maypole of Merry Mount once stood on the Wollaston hilltop, the great stone face is not yet weathered beyond all recognition, and the legends of the Province House are amply documented.