I've just, finally, finished reading "The Marble Faun" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and I now have some conception of what it feels like to have run a marathon dressed in full deep-sea diving gear. His work is considered part of the Romantic movement and includes novels, short stories, and a biography of his friend, the United States President Franklin Pierce. Much of Hawthorne's writing centers around New England and many feature moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, leaving behind his wife and their three children. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before returning to The Wayside in 1860. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels.
The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. He worked at a Custom House and joined a Transcendentalist Utopian community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. In 1837, he published Twice-Told Tales and became engaged to painter and illustrator Sophia Peabody the next year. Hawthorne anonymously published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828. Shortly after graduating from Bowdoin College, Hathorne changed his name to Hawthorne. He is seen as a key figure in the development of American literature for his tales of the nation's colonial history. Nathaniel Hawthorne was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. As the characters find their civilized existence disrupted by the awful consequences of impulse, Hawthorne leads his readers to question the value of Art and Culture and addresses the great evolutionary debate which was beginning to shake Victorian society. The author's evocative descriptions of classic sites made The Marble Faun a favorite guidebook to Rome for Victorian tourists, but this richly ambiguous symbolic romance is also the story of a murder, and a parable of the Fall of Man.
Hawthorne's 'International Novel' dramatizes the confrontation of the Old World and the New and the uncertain relationship between the 'authentic' and the 'fake' in life as in art. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the "Marble Faun," Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam's unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy. The fragility-and the durability-of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century.
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