Born in Salem, Mass, Nathaniel Hawthorne was a descendant of a judge in the Salem witch trials. He spent a solitary, bookish childhood with his widowed and antisocial mother. After graduating from Bowdoin College, he returned to Salem and prepared for a writing career with 12 years of solitary study and writing interrupted by summer tours through the Northeast. After privately publishing a novel, Fanshawe in 1828, he began publishing stories in the Token and New England Magazine. These original allegories of New England Puritanism, including such classic stories as "The Minister's Black Veil," were collected in, Twice-Told Tales, published in 1837. A brief period of paid employment, including the compilation of popular children's works and a stint at the Boston Custom House from 1839-to 1841, was followed by a half-year's residence at the transcendentalist community, Brook Farm. In 1842 he married Sophia Amelia Peabody, also a transcendentalist, and they moved to Concord, Mass., where he began a friendship with Henry David Thoreau.
