Surrounded by Friends, He Wrote About a Brave Woman's Loneliness

Rejected!

Publishers turned down The Scarlet Letter until he rewrote it. However, their accusations weren’t that it glorified adultery, vilified a clergyman, or made excuses for sin. No, publishers said The Scarlet Letter was too short – and they didn’t think readers would pay for a book so thin. So, Hawthorne padded it out by adding details from his dreary day job. He was a clerk at the Boston Customs House at the insistence of his father who saw no future in authoring books. Young Hawthorne hated the drudgery of customs – levying and recording duties for imported goods. In The Scarlet Letter, he describes being ordered to clean out the customs house attic and there finding a forgotten diary – which describes the sad life of a lonely, rejected young woman officially banned from society for bearing a child out of wedlock – although the father of her child received no such scorn.

He Tried Communism!

Hawthorne was one of the financiers of an experiment in socialism – the Brook Farm near Boston. The idea was that residents could live together in a commune, owning nothing, unbound by the pressures of capitalism. Spurning the profit motive, everyone was to be paid according to their need, then would work according to their ability – following the ideals of Communism’s founder, Karl Marx. Unfortunately, with little incentive to work hard, residents of the Brook Farm didn’t put out the extra effort necessary for a farm to succeed. Hawthorne wrote that he expected leisurely farm life to free him up to write, but instead he was required to cut straw, milk cows and shovel manure. His blistered hands made it difficult to write and he wondered how anyone could “expect pretty stories from a man who feeds pigs.” Disillusioned, he abandoned the commune after just a few months. The experiment went broke, destroyed by the unmotivated, self-interested behavior of its other members. Hawthorne’s 1852 novel, The Blithedale Romance, describes the misadventure.