Four Classic American Novels

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 and returned to Salem determined to become a writer of short stories. For the next twelve years, he struggled to master his craft, experiencing unhappiness and self-doubt. He finally achieved some success with the publication of Twice-Told Tales (1837). The Scarlet Letter (1850) brought him immediate recognition, followed by The House of the Seven Gables (1851). After serving four years as the American Consul in Liverpool, England, he traveled in Italy and returned home to Massachusetts in 1860. He died on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire.

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, died in Redding, Connecticut, in 1910. A man of extraordinary contrasts, he left school at twelve when his father died but was later awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His varied career included being a printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. Though he made fortunes from his writing, he resorted to lecture tours to pay his debts near the end of his life. He is remembered as a great artist in American letters, whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”

Stephen Crane was born in Newark, NJ, in 1871, the youngest of fourteen children. He wrote Maggie: A Girl of the Streets as an undergraduate at Syracuse University. In 1895, he gained acclaim for The Red Badge of Courage, hailed as the epitome of war stories, despite never having seen battle. An active journalist, he reported from Greece and Cuba in addition to being an acclaimed novelist. He died of tuberculosis in Germany in 1900.

Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, the son of a merchant. Orphaned at twelve when his father died bankrupt, Melville worked as a bank clerk, a ship’s cabin-boy, and an elementary schoolteacher before shipping out in 1841 on a whaler bound for the Pacific. Deserting ship the following year in the Marquesas, he traveled to Tahiti and Honolulu, returning as an ordinary seaman on a frigate to Boston, where he was discharged in October 1844. Books based on these adventures brought him immediate success. By 1850, he was working on his masterpiece, Moby-Dick. Literary success soon faded as his complexity increasingly alienated readers. In 1863, during the Civil War, he moved back to New York City, where he worked as a deputy inspector in the Custom House from 1866 to 1885. He died there in 1891. A draft of his final prose work, Billy Budd, Sailor, was left unfinished and packed away by his widow, remaining undiscovered until its publication in 1924.

Sandra Newman is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Country of Ice Cream Star. She has taught writing and literature at Temple University, Chapman University, and the University of Colorado. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Harper’s, Granta, and London’s Observer, Telegraph, and Mail on Sunday newspapers, among other journals and newspapers.

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