Salem Is My Dwelling Place
Life Of Nathaniel Hawthorne
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- $37.99
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- $37.99
Publisher Description
In one of his public disavowals of autobiography, Nathaniel Hawthorne informed his readers that external traits “hide the man, instead of displaying him,” directing them instead to “look through the whole range of his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any of his essential traits.” In this multidimensional biography of America’s first great storyteller, Edwin Haviland Miller answers Hawthorne’s challenge and reveals the inner landscapes of this modest, magnetic man who hid himself in his fiction. Thomas Woodson hails Miller’s account as “the best biography of this most elusive of American authors.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mirroring the psychological complexity of Hawthorne's fiction, this superbly illuminating biography teases out the secrets of the writer's anguished soul. An almost pathologically shy Customs House measurer, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is portrayed as an agnostic given to suicidal despair, a passive parent and a quiet egomaniac with a powerful narcissistic craving for fame and immortality. Unable to communicate love, at four years old wounded by his father's death at sea, burdened with repressed sexual conflict, Hawthorne mined his unconscious in a fictive universe fraught with incest, voyeurism, matricide, patricide and male terror of sexuality. In the fullest picture of Hawthorne's personal life to date, Miller ( Melville ) traces the connections between the novelist's veiled conflicts and the symbolic inner landscape of his fiction. Photos. Readers Subscription Book Club main selection.
