SALEM IS MY DWELLING PLACE: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Traces the life of the nineteenth-century New England novelist, examines each of his major works, and describes the social and political background of the period

Mirroring the psychological complexity of Hawthorne's fiction, this superbly illuminating biography teases out the secrets of the writer's anguished soul. An almost pathologically shy Customs House measurer, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is portrayed as an agnostic given to suicidal despair, a passive parent and a quiet egomaniac with a powerful narcissistic craving for fame and immortality. Unable to communicate love, at four years old wounded by his father's death at sea, burdened with repressed sexual conflict, Hawthorne mined his unconscious in a fictive universe fraught with incest, voyeurism, matricide, patricide and male terror of sexuality. In the fullest picture of Hawthorne's personal life to date, Miller ( Melville ) traces the connections between the novelist's veiled conflicts and the symbolic inner landscape of his fiction. Photos. Readers Subscription Book Club main selection.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Psychologically probing (but free of all jargon), Miller's elegantly written study gives us a fresh, sympathetic picture of an immensely complex, repressed man. Hawthorne's fiction (especially the four completed novels) is tantalizingly veiled autobiography in which he reveals, among other things, his love-hate relationship with his stern Salem ancestors and his abiding sense of having been early abandoned by his father, who died at sea. Recognizing that Hawthorne's fiction revolves around family, Miller explores (with brilliant results) what lay below the surface of Hawthorne's apparently idyllic relationship with his wife Sophia, his mother, and his contemporary, Melville. This is a masterful work, wholly satisfying.
- Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.