Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An exemplary biography of a preeminent man of letters, 24 Oct 2004
This thoughtful and graceful biography of Nathanial Hawthorne cogently captures his human complexity, which in turn reflects the polarities of the American character and experience that he vividly described in his self-styled romances: head and heart, reason and emotion, reality and imagination, Puritanism and Quakerism, republicanism and federalism, states' rights and national union, slavery and abolition, heritage and freedom, tradition and independence. Brenda Wineapple's book skillfully chronicles Hawthorne's early and recurrent poverty, peripateticism, Hamlet-like indecisiveness, ambivalence about writing, and tendency to observe rather than to participate in life; and, like a Dickens novel, her work presents the author's family and distinguished circle of friends as fully developed and plausibly motivated characters: Franklin Pierce, Emerson, Melville, and, at a greater remove, Stowe, Whitman, and Poe. This volume's evident scholarship - it contains more than one hundred pages of notes - is expressed in a highly palatable style that is also educative in its unobtrusive use of words sufficiently uncommon (e.g., atavistic, metonymic, solipsistic) to cause some readers to consult their dictionaries frequently. In sum, this work is the triumphant achievement of an ambitious undertaking.
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