Nathaniel Hawthorne is often considered a profoundly Christian writer. He found pride the root sin. Faith in nature was only easy optimism. What he did best was to translate the heavy moral burden of life into the substance of his imagination. Personally, I think that it would be fair to consider Hawthorn a Christian writer with many characteristics seeing in humanist writers. There could be a fine line, but if we take into consideration that the base of his writing comes from a puritan background, Hawthorn's writing goes far more into the moral struggles within a society than the Christian struggles or soul saving.
Hawthorn was an American novelist and short-story writes who was a master …show more content…
His marvelously crafted stories take us deeply into the American soul, with its dark motives, conflicting aspirations, and moral struggles. The Scarlet Letter tells the story of two lovers kept apart by the ironies of fate, their own mingled strengths and weaknesses, and the Puritan community’s interpretation of moral law, until at last death unites them under a single headstone. The book made Hawthorne famous and was eventually recognized as one of the greatest of American …show more content…
Person points out in his chapter, “Hawthorne and History, ” an abundance of New Historicist scholarship has focused attention on Hawthorne's engagement with contemporary social and political contexts, and the result has been a more worldly Hawthorne than the Great Artist admired and explicated so well by the New Critics. Readers have been made aware of the subtle ways in which Hawthorne's writings respond to his own times as they draw upon the past. 'The Scarlet Letter', for example, though set within the Puritan world of seventeenth-century Boston, reacts to a number of mid-nineteenth-century developments, such as the European revolutions of 1848, the Women's Rights Movement, and the growing controversy over slavery in the United States. The novel, in other words, is product and producer of the culture surrounding