Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer, the most significant writer of the American Renaissance alongside Melville and Emerson. Haunted by his Puritan ancestors — one of whom had been a judge in the Salem witch trials — he returned again and again to themes of guilt, sin, and the corrosive power of secret shame. The Scarlet Letter (1850) is his masterpiece. He was a close friend of Melville, who dedicated Moby-Dick to him.
