He read Spenser,
Rousseau, and the "Newgate Calendar," was graduated at Bowdoin,
with Longfellow, in the class of 1825, and returned to Salem for
thirteen brooding lonely years in which he tried to teach himself
the art of story-writing. His earliest tales, like Irving's, are
essays in which characters emerge; he is absorbed in finding a
setting for a preconceived "moral"; he is in love with allegory
and parable. His own words about his first collection of stories,
"Twice-Told Tales," have often been quoted: "They have the pale
tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." Yet they
are for the most part exquisitely written. After a couple of
years in the Boston Custom-House, and a residence at the
socialistic community of Brook Farm, Hawthorne made the happiest
of marriages to Sophia Peabody, and for nearly four years dwelt
in the Old Manse at Concord. He described it in one of the ripest
of his essays, the Preface to "Mosses from an Old Manse," his
second collection of stories. After three years in the
Custom-House at Salem, his dismissal in 1849 gave him leisure to
produce his masterpiece, "The Scarlet Letter," published in 1850.
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