Nathaniel hawthorne brenda wineapple biography
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Hawthorne: A Life
Well, Ms. Wineapple can't state in any clear and distinct manner what she intimates - but I'll say it for her - even if she didn't mean what I'll say she meant. It's easy for me. After all, there's nothing at stake for me in a summary judgement.
The source of Hawthorne's life-long, unnatural reserve and self-possessed detachment appears to be his experience of about twenty years, from early adolescence and perhaps from an earlier date (these events are rather dimly revealed in the record), of unremitting hypercriticism, shaming and a healthy dose of public humiliation from time to time at the hands of his mother, certainly his aunts and maternal grandmother and perhaps an uncle or two. Most of his Manning relatives - who supported the Hawthorne's after the elder Captain Hawthorne's death of typhoid in Surinam - seemed to have assumed that because they assisted poor relations, they were entitled to "the right of ... treating me
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Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life
Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
What is the good of literary biography? I am not a great reader of the genre, possibly because every example I’ve ever read has had a passage like this in it, from Brenda Wineapple’s popular and absorbing 2003 life of Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Like most of Hawthorne’s fiction, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a biographical palimpsest. Dr. Rappaccini is Sophia’s father and Waldo Emerson. (Concord busybodies said Lidian Emerson was poisoning herself with medicine extracted from several plants.) Rappaccini is also Fuller’s father, whose stiff-backed education of Margaret was as destructive, if as well intentioned; he’s Uncle Robert, another horticulturalist of decided purpose; and he’s Hawthorne, the father-gardener, who fusses over his wife’s diet and her health.
Can one of the strangest and most profound short stories e
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Brenda Wineapple
Ambassador Award, Best Biography 2003
Julia Howe Award, Boston Book Club 2003
Handsome, reserved, almost frighteningly aloof until he was approached, then playful and cordial, Nathaniel Hawthorne was a mercurial and double-edged as his writing. “Deep as Dante,” Melville said.
Hawthorne himself declared that he was not “one of those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit” for the public. Yet those who knew him best often took the opposition position. “He always put han själv in his books,” said a sister-in-law. “He cannot help it.” His life, like his work, was extraordinary, a play of light and shadow.
He also shoveled dung in an attempt to found a new utopia at Brook Farm and then excoriated the community (or his attraction to it) in caustic satire; and the confidant of Franklin Pierce, fourteenth president of the United States and arguably one of its worst, he was also the friend of Em