Why Nathaniel Hawthorne added a W to escape a Salem witch judge
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born a Hathorne, great-great-grandson of John Hathorne, one of the judges at the Salem witch trials. Probably in his early twenties, just after college, he slipped a w into his surname to distance himself from that notorious lineage, then built a career writing about sin and Puritan New England.
He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1804. The first Hathorne in America, William, had been a Puritan magistrate and judge remembered for harsh sentences. Nathaniel's father, a sea captain, died of yellow fever in Dutch Suriname in 1808, and the widow took her children to live with Manning relatives in Salem. An injury playing bat and ball in 1813 left the boy lame and bedridden for a year, though doctors could find nothing wrong.
Funded by his uncle Robert Manning, he entered Bowdoin College in 1821, meeting the future president Franklin Pierce at a stage stop in Portland and befriending Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on campus; he graduated in 1825, describing himself as an idle student. His first novel, Fanshawe, came out anonymously in October 1828, paid for with $100 of his own money, and sold poorly; he later tried to suppress it. Twice-Told Tales gathered his magazine stories in 1837.
In 1839 he took a post as weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House, a job he felt smothered his writing. To save for marriage to the illustrator Sophia Peabody, he joined the Brook Farm commune in 1841, paying a $1,000 deposit and being set to shovel a manure heap nicknamed the Gold Mine; he left within the year and later mined the episode for The Blithedale Romance. They wed in 1842 and settled at The Old Manse in Concord.
The Scarlet Letter appeared in mid-March 1850 and was among the earliest American books produced in bulk, shifting 2,500 copies in ten days, though it earned him only $1,500 across 14 years. He wrote a campaign biography for Pierce, who won the presidency in 1852, and a consular appointment later took the family to Europe until 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and his Salem birthplace is now open to visitors.
Source: Nathaniel Hawthorne
