Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, a port which had once been prosperous, but had lost in competition with the great cities. It was a mournful place, living in the memory of its past, which included the drowning and hanging of witches, a frenzy of religious terror in which an ancestor of Hawthorne had been a persecuting judge. One of this judge’s victims had put a curse upon him, and the novelist pictures himself, playfully, as the last sad relic of this curse. He was a solitary man, born to poverty, shy, aloof and obscure. Recognition did not come until the middle forties, and meantime he lived in ancient, lonely houses, staying indoors by day and wandering the streets by night. He had no political sense, no social sense; events in the world outside meant little--he lived in the past. Yet, strangely enough, he did not accept the ideas of this past. He had nothing of the robust Tory fervor of Sir Walter Scott; he was a modern man, and a quiet, skeptical humor shines through his pages. What had happened was that his faith had dried up, and nothing else had come to take its place; so there he was, not knowing why, or how, or to what end. He wrote elaborate diaries, full of minute details about the things which happened hour by hour; things which only a child would consider worth recording. He would produce and publish a sketch in which, with really beautiful art, he would describe the sensations of walking about the streets of Salem on a rainy night, and how the lights shone in the puddles--yellow lights of the street-lamps and blue and green lights from the drug-stores. He gathered strange legends of old-time people, living terror-haunted lives, driven to sin by the very desperation of their efforts to avoid it. The pangs of conscience are Hawthorne’s “local color” and artistic tradition; he knows them in every detail, but he himself is not under their spell--they are like bric-à-brac and objects of art which he collects. “Twice-Told Tales” was the title of his first volume, and this, you see, prepares us for conscious literary artifice. Then we have “Mosses from an Old Manse” which promises mournfulness and moldiness, desolation and decay. Then “The House of the Seven Gables,” the hiding place of an old and dying family haunted by a curse. “The Scarlet Letter” brought its author instant recognition, and is considered by many critics America’s most authentic masterpiece of fiction. A young married woman in the old-time witch-hunting Salem has yielded to adulterous love for a young clergyman. A child is born, and the mother is publicly accused, and exhibited upon the scaffold, with the letter “A” embroidered in scarlet cloth upon her dress. She will not reveal the name of her lover, and so the young clergyman escapes obloquy, but is haunted by that sense of guilt which is the principal product of Puritanism in decay.