From Publishers Weekly
One of the great American writers of the 19th century never fully believed in his profession. For Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing was "a source of shame as much as pleasure and a necessity he could neither forgo nor entirely approve," says Wineapple (Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner). He uprooted his family again and again, shuttling between government jobs and the solitary writing life, never fully satisfied with either. His romances were brilliant and powerful, but his own life seemed muted and melancholy. Although he had an impressive set of friends and associates during his early years in New England, he nevertheless led a strikingly reclusive existence; he was neighbors with Emerson and Thoreau in Concord, Mass., classmates with Longfellow and Franklin Pierce at Bowdoin, and a good friend to Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville, but very little is made of these relationships. His friends and associates repeatedly described Hawthorne as enigmatic, a man who loved humanity in the abstract but not in its particulars. Wineapple, too, seems mystified by Hawthorne and his life, insecure about his motives. The biography assumes a reportorial style, presenting conflicting views (of his ambiguous friendship with Melville, of his mysterious death) without putting forth any pet theories or compelling evidence to sway the reader one way or the other. The final years of his life coincided with an incredibly tumultuous period in American history, the Civil War, and Wineapple describes how Hawthorne alienated many Northerners with his proslavery views. One critic described his politics as "pure intellect, without emotion, without sympathy, without principle" and that best captures the essence of Nathaniel Hawthorne as depicted in this biography. 56 photos. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The great novelist Hawthorne gave his readers no fictional character more tantalizing than the strange person staring back at him from his mirror: a man who talked to himself in the dark. Shrewd and patient, Wineapple has learned much by listening in on Hawthorne's shadowed soliloquies. She has heard the interior monologue of a writer animated by Puritan impulses inherited from a great-grandfather who condemned innocent women to hang as witches--and whose posterity lived under the gallows curse of one of them. She has also heard the mental debate of a man who hated slavery--and yet accepted political appointment from its apologists. And she has made herself privy to the anxieties of a father determined to snuff out the literary ambitions of three children inspired by his own example. But besides insinuating herself into Hawthorne's oft-clouded mind, Wineapple has also attended to the public controversies that shaped his world: the Whig triumphs that cost him his custom-house job and forced him into writing; the critical exchanges that heartened him with praise for his work (including that from fellow author Herman Melville) and wounded him with disparagement; and the Civil War battles that drove him to despair--and into political disrepute as a copperhead. But whatever her focus, Wineapple never ceases to probe the artistic processes behind such masterpieces as The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables. A portrait both convincing and memorable. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
 “Clearly the best biography of Hawthorne; the Hawthorne for our time. Beautifully conceived and written, it conveys the full poignancy and complexity of Hawthorne’s life; it makes vivid the times and people and places — and what a rich array of people and events! A delight to read from start to end.”

--Sacvan Bercovitch

“Brenda Wineapple’s Hawthorne is, quite literally, an electrifying life. The power and sweep of the writing galvanizes a subject frozen, by earlier biographies, into a series of stills. We understand, finally, a man and artist torn by every conflict of his time, adding a few of his own, a man both strange and strangely familiar. The great achievement of this stunning biography lies in the feat of restoring Hawthorne to the rich and roiling America of his own period, while revealing him, for the first time, as our contemporary.”

--Benita Eisler

“With the possible exception of Herman Melville, no one has ever understood the grand tragic Shakespearian nature of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and work as well as Brenda Wineapple. Her brilliant, powerful, nervy, unsettling and riveting book is authoritatively researched and beautifully written; it has itself the dark mesmeric power of a Hawthorne story. Wineapple's Hawthorne is an intensely private man, compounded of strange depths, mysterious failings, concealments, yearnings and unmistakable incandescent genius.”

--Robert D. Richardson

“Brenda Wineapple illuminates Hawthorne's complexities without demystifying the man. He remains one of the most intriguing American writers: dark, guilty, erotic, and psychologically acute – qualities that Wineapple deftly explores.”

--Margot Peters

“There is no justice for Hawthorne without the mercy which failed him in life and art. In Wineapple's new dispensation, all the man endured and the art achieved is revealed by loving scruple and, to awful circumstance, condolent response. No biographer since James, no critic since Lawrence has limned so unsparing and therefore so speaking a likeness of our first great fabulist, from which one returns to the works with enlightened wonder. More darkness, more light! Here both abound.”

--Richard Howard


“A fine biography...A sensitive reading of Hawthorne’s character...Wineapple makes generous use of a cache of family letters that detail the tangle and tussle of wills that Hawthorne had entered as son, brother, lover, and husband, all the while seeking the freedom of spirit to exercise his genius.”

--Justin Kaplan, Washington Post

“Meticulously researched and superbly written...captures the novelist in high resolution.”

--Peter Campion, San Francisco Chronicle


“A vivid account of a highly interesting life.”

--Brooke Allen, New York Times Book Review


“Richly detailed and nuanced; a model of literary biography and an illumination for students of Hawthorne’s work...A thoughtful and absorbing life.”

--Kirkus (starred)


“A thoroughly engrossing story of a writer's life… written with novelistic grace and flow, with an eye to the telling detail and apt quotation.”

--Dan Cryer, New York Newsday


“Wineapple is a splendid stylist and a master of concision. She can capture an entire personality and life in a brief paragraph, … She can define a complex amatory relationship in a sentence…. Her eloquent hands bring Hawthorne vividly alive for us.”

--Jamie Spencer, St. Louis-Post Dispatch



From the Hardcover edition.


Review
 ?Clearly the best biography of Hawthorne; the Hawthorne for our time. Beautifully conceived and written, it conveys the full poignancy and complexity of Hawthorne?s life; it makes vivid the times and people and places ? and what a rich array of people and events! A delight to read from start to end.?

--Sacvan Bercovitch

?Brenda Wineapple?s Hawthorne is, quite literally, an electrifying life. The power and sweep of the writing galvanizes a subject frozen, by earlier biographies, into a series of stills. We understand, finally, a man and artist torn by every conflict of his time, adding a few of his own, a man both strange and strangely familiar. The great achievement of this stunning biography lies in the feat of restoring Hawthorne to the rich and roiling America of his own period, while revealing him, for the first time, as our contemporary.?

--Benita Eisler

?With the possible exception of Herman Melville, no one has ever understood the grand tragic Shakespearian nature of Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and work as well as Brenda Wineapple. Her brilliant, powerful, nervy, unsettling and riveting book is authoritatively researched and beautifully written; it has itself the dark mesmeric power of a Hawthorne story. Wineapple's Hawthorne is an intensely private man, compounded of strange depths, mysterious failings, concealments, yearnings and unmistakable incandescent genius.?

--Robert D. Richardson

?Brenda Wineapple illuminates Hawthorne's complexities without demystifying the man. He remains one of the most intriguing American writers: dark, guilty, erotic, and psychologically acute ? qualities that Wineapple deftly explores.?

--Margot Peters

?There is no justice for Hawthorne without the mercy which failed him in life and art. In Wineapple's new dispensation, all the man endured and the art achieved is revealed by loving scruple and, to awful circumstance, condolent response. No biographer since James, no critic since Lawrence has limned so unsparing and therefore so speaking a likeness of our first great fabulist, from which one returns to the works with enlightened wonder. More darkness, more light! Here both abound.?

--Richard Howard


?A fine biography...A sensitive reading of Hawthorne?s character...Wineapple makes generous use of a cache of family letters that detail the tangle and tussle of wills that Hawthorne had entered as son, brother, lover, and husband, all the while seeking the freedom of spirit to exercise his genius.?

--Justin Kaplan, Washington Post

?Meticulously researched and superbly written...captures the novelist in high resolution.?

--Peter Campion, San Francisco Chronicle


?A vivid account of a highly interesting life.?

--Brooke Allen, New York Times Book Review


?Richly detailed and nuanced; a model of literary biography and an illumination for students of Hawthorne?s work...A thoughtful and absorbing life.?

--Kirkus (starred)


?A thoroughly engrossing story of a writer's life? written with novelistic grace and flow, with an eye to the telling detail and apt quotation.?

--Dan Cryer, New York Newsday


?Wineapple is a splendid stylist and a master of concision. She can capture an entire personality and life in a brief paragraph, ? She can define a complex amatory relationship in a sentence?. Her eloquent hands bring Hawthorne vividly alive for us.?

--Jamie Spencer, St. Louis-Post Dispatch



From the Hardcover edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Mercurial and Double-Edged as His Writing, Nathaniel Hawthorne stands before us as a strangely modern figure -- darkly handsome, obsessed with family secrets and guilt, self-conscious, charismatic, a man of endless complexity, and an artist of incomparable genius. His intimates included Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Franklin Pierce -- yet even among his closest friends he remained elusive.

Brenda Wineapple succeeds as no other biographer has in giving us the man in full -- the tender husband and father, the tortured scion of a once great New England family, the loyal friend, the towering but ultimately tragic writer. Written with passion and grace, dazzling in its insights, Hawthorne: A Life paints a stunning portrait of a quintessential American author and of the age he helped create. A model of the biographer's art, it will stand as one of the great literary lives of our day.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Washington Post

Much to her credit, Wineapple avoids formulas in her sensitive and even-handed reading of Hawthorne's character. She renders him in shifting lights and shifting circumstances as remote and congenial, taciturn and gregarious, hag-ridden and carefree, but always in the service of his writing. — Justin Kaplan

The New York Times

Brenda Wineapple...is the latest writer to tackle Hawthorne's life and try to distill his shadowy essence. If the attempt is in any way unsatisfactory, it is probably because of something unsatisfactory in the subject's own character; Hawthorne withdraws from the biographer as successfully as he did from his family and friends. But Wineapple is a good storyteller and has created a vivid account of a highly interesting life; she has also managed to communicate, if not to resolve, the man's puzzling contradictions.—Brooke Allen

The New Yorker

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ambition was such that he always considered himself a failure. A prude and a mama’s boy, haunted by the fear that writing was not a manly profession, he was ashamed of his fame. Far from being the anti-Puritan that his work suggests, he was an irascible conservative, who believed that women shouldn’t be writers, and who, during the Civil War, horrified his more enlightened peers by displaying equal contempt for North and South. After his death, critics grappled with “the paradox of Hawthorne,” resorting to hydraulic metaphors for his genius: it was overwhelming; it was forced into channels. Wineapple’s take is notable for its plain acceptance of Hawthorne’s contradictions: a student of hypocrisy, he was a resolute Yankee who hated his patrimony.

Publishers Weekly

One of the great American writers of the 19th century never fully believed in his profession. For Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing was "a source of shame as much as pleasure and a necessity he could neither forgo nor entirely approve," says Wineapple (Genet: A Biography of Janet Flanner). He uprooted his family again and again, shuttling between government jobs and the solitary writing life, never fully satisfied with either. His romances were brilliant and powerful, but his own life seemed muted and melancholy. Although he had an impressive set of friends and associates during his early years in New England, he nevertheless led a strikingly reclusive existence; he was neighbors with Emerson and Thoreau in Concord, Mass., classmates with Longfellow and Franklin Pierce at Bowdoin, and a good friend to Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville, but very little is made of these relationships. His friends and associates repeatedly described Hawthorne as enigmatic, a man who loved humanity in the abstract but not in its particulars. Wineapple, too, seems mystified by Hawthorne and his life, insecure about his motives. The biography assumes a reportorial style, presenting conflicting views (of his ambiguous friendship with Melville, of his mysterious death) without putting forth any pet theories or compelling evidence to sway the reader one way or the other. The final years of his life coincided with an incredibly tumultuous period in American history, the Civil War, and Wineapple describes how Hawthorne alienated many Northerners with his proslavery views. One critic described his politics as "pure intellect, without emotion, without sympathy, without principle" and that best captures the essence of Nathaniel Hawthorne as depicted in this biography. 56 photos. (Oct. 2) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

KLIATT - Janet Julian