The Artistic Features And Writing Style of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Keywords: Nathaniel Hawthorne . the artistic features .writing style
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, the descendent of a long line of Puritan ancestors, including John Hathorne, a presiding magistrate in the Salem which trials. Hawthorne was bron into the family of a sea captatain. After his father was lost at sea when he was only four, his mother became overly protective and pushed him toward more isolated pursuits. Hawthorne's childhood left him overly shy and bookish, and molded his life as a writer.
Hawthorne turned to writing after his graduation from Bowdoin College. His first novel,Fanshawe, was unsuccessful and Hawthorne himself disavowed it as amateurish. However, he wrote several successful short stories.
For long Hawthorne has been considered to be the first great American writer of fiction to work in the moralistic tradition which can be traced down through sush leading novelists as Henry James and William Faulkner. Different from his contemporary novelists in relation to literary themes, Hawthorne showed a great interest in the problem of guilt , and his major novels generally dealt with sensational material, like poisoning, murder, adultery, and crime, because he was ambitious to explore the result of sin, the effect on human conscience of guilt, pride, egotism, and isolation. His concern with moral or ethical problems and his talent in dealing with them in the form of novel attained him success as a novelist and a momentous position in the history of American literature.
