Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American author best known for his dark novels and stories set in Puritan New England that grapple with sin and the nature of evil.  He was born in Salem, Massachusetts to a family with deep roots in the Boston area. His father was a sea captain who died in 1808, forcing the family to live with his mother’s relatives, first in Salem and then near Sebago Lake in Maine.  He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 and started publishing short stories that were eventually collected as Twice-Told Tales in 1837. He lived for a time at the Brook Farm transcendentalist Utopian community before marrying Sophia Peabody in 1842 and moving to Concord next to Ralph Waldo Emerson.  In 1846 he won an appointment to the Salem Custom House and returned to Salem, where he wrote The Scarlet Letter in 1850. He moved to Lenox, Massachusetts that same year, where he became friends with Herman Melville and wrote The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. The family returned to Concord in 1852, where he wrote the campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce. Pierce’s election earned him an appointment as U.S. consul in Liverpool. The family returned to Concord in 1860, where he wrote The Marble Faun.  After a period of failing health he died on a tour in the White Mountains in 1864 and was buried on Author’s Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.