Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American writer was the son of Elizabeth Clarke Manning and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was born July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. He is a descendant of a long line of Puritan ancestors, including his great-grandfather John Hathorne, who was a judge in the Salem witch trials. He was not proud of his family's origins and to dissociate himself from them he added a "w" to his surname to make it Hawthorne. Hawthorne's father was a ship captain in the United States Navy and died of yellow fever when Hawthorne was four years old. -years. After his father's death, his mother became overly protective of him and this left him shy and studious. This is later what shaped his writing career. In 1821 Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College and graduated four years later. He chose a school close to his mother and sisters. After graduation he turned his passion into writing and published his first novel Fanshawe. This novel was unsuccessful, but it did not discourage Hawthorne. A few years later he wrote some short stories and “Young Goodman Brown” was one of the famous ones. After realizing he couldn't make a living as a writer (due to financial need) he decided to enter the workforce. In 1839 he got a job at the Boston Custom House, but was fired three years later. By 1842 his writing began to _______________ and he was able to maintain an adequate income. Only then did he marry Sofia Peabody and move to The Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, which was the center of the Transcendental movement. In 1845 Hawthorne returned to Salem and devoted himself to his most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. He described this novel as a "hell story". It was published in 1850 and was a... middle of paper......ment. The people of Boston stopped communicating with him because of the simple black veil that hid his face. "I don't like it," muttered an old woman, as she limped into the meetinghouse. “He turned into something horrible, just by hiding his face.” The evidence of a veil hiding her face frightened the people of this small Puritan town. Elizabeth, his fiancée, asked, “Lift the veil but once and look me in the face has established the fact that she and other people definitely are.” fear of the unknown. The veil teaches individuals to have courage and refrain from arrogance. The people of the city were very arrogant in their mentality. Everyone contradicted their core beliefs, therefore they were hypocrites by their very nature. The minister tried to reflect everyone's flaws by using the black veil as an object.