Collected Prose

published in 1850 and 1851. The Scarlet Letter had turned “the obscurest man of letters in America” into one of the most respected and celebrated writers of his time, and The House of the Seven Gables had only strengthened his reputation, prompting many critics to call him the finest writer the Republic had yet produced. Years of solitary labor had at last won him public reward, and after two decades of scrambling to make ends meet, 1851 marked the first year that Hawthorne earned enough from his writing to be able to support his family. Nor was there any reason to think that his success would not continue. Throughout the spring and early summer, he had written A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys , finishing the preface on July fifteenth, just two weeks before Sophia’s departure for West Newton, and he was already making plans for his next novel, The Blithedale Romance . Looking back on Hawthorne’s career now, and knowing that he would be dead just thirteen years later (a few weeks short of his sixtieth birthday), that season in Lenox stands out as one of the happiest periods of his life, a moment of sublime equipoise and fulfillment. But it was nearly August now, and for many years Hawthorne had routinely suspended his literary work during the hot months. It was a time for loafing and reflection, in his opinion, a time for being outdoors, and he had always written as little as possible throughout the dog days of the New England summers. When he composed his little chronicle of the three weeks he spent with his son, he was not stealing time from other, more important projects. It was the only work he did, the only work he wanted to do.
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    The move to Lenox had been precipitated by Hawthorne’s disastrous experiences in Salem in 1849. As he put it in a letter to his friend Horatio Bridge, he had come to dislike the town “so much that I hate to go into the streets or to have the people see me. Anywhere else, I shall at once be entirely another man.” Appointed to the post of Surveyor in the Salem Custom House in 1846 (during the Democratic administration of James Polk), Hawthorne accomplished almost nothing as a writer during the three years he held this job. With the election of Whig candidate Zachary Taylor in 1848, Hawthorne was sacked when the new administration took office in March 1849—but not without raising a great noise in his own defense, which led to a highly publicized controversy about the practice of political patronage in America. At the precise moment when this struggle was being waged, Hawthorne’s mother died after a short illness. The notebook entries from those days in late July are among the most wrenching, emotionally charged paragraphs in all of Hawthorne. “Louisa pointed to a chair near the bed; but I was moved to kneel down close to my mother, and take her hand. She knew me, but could only murmur a few indistinct words—among which I understood an injunction to take care of my sisters. Mrs. Dike left the chamber, and then I found the tears slowly gathering in my eyes. I tried to keep them down; but it would not be—I kept filling up, till, for a few moments, I shook with sobs. For a long time, I knelt there, holding her hand; and surely it is the darkest hour I have ever lived.”
    Ten days after his mother’s death, Hawthorne lost his fight to save his job. Within days of his dismissal (perhaps even the same day, if family legend is to be believed), he began writing The Scarlet Letter , which was completed in six months. Under great financial strain during this period, his fortunes took a sudden, unexpected turn for the better just as plans were being made by the firm of Ticknor and Fields to publish the novel. By private, anonymous subscription, friends and supporters of Hawthorne (among them, most likely, Longfellow and Lowell) “who admire your genius and respect your character … [and to pay] the debt we owe you for what you have done for American literature” had raised the sum of five hundred dollars to help see Hawthorne through his difficulties. This windfall allowed Hawthorne to carry out his increasingly urgent desire to leave Salem, his hometown, and become “a citizen of somewhere else.”
    After a number of possibilities fell through (a farm in Manchester, New Hampshire, a house in Kittery, Maine), he and Sophia eventually settled on the red farmhouse in Lenox. It was, as Hawthorne put it to one of his former Custom House co-workers, “as red as the Scarlet