Introduction 3 Chapter 1. Nathaniel Hawthorne - his life and work 5
1.1 Nathaniel Hawthorne's childhood home in Raymond, ME 5
1.2 Early career 7
Chapter 2. Marriage and family 9
2.1 Sophia Peabody Hawthorne 9
Conclusion 20 Reference 21 Introduction In 1836 Longfellow returned to Harvard and settled in the famous Craigie House, which was later given to him as a wedding present when he remarried in 1843. His travel sketches, Outre-Mer (1835), did not succeed. In 1839 he published Voices of the Night, which contained the poems “Hymn to the Night,” “The Psalm of Life,” and “The Light of the Stars” and achieved immediate popularity. That same year Longfellow published Hyperion, a romantic novel idealizing his European travels. In 1842 his Ballads and Other Poems, containing such favourites as “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Village Blacksmith,” swept the nation. The antislavery sentiments he expressed in Poems on Slavery that same year, however, lacked the humanity and power of John Greenleaf Whittier’s denunciations on the same theme. Longfellow was more at home in Evangeline (1847), a narrative poem that reached almost every literate home in the United States. It is a sentimental tale of two lovers separated when British soldiers expel the Acadians (French colonists) from what is now Nova Scotia. The lovers, Evangeline and Gabriel, are reunited years later as Gabriel is dying.
Longfellow presided over Harvard’s modern-language program for 18 years and then left teaching in 1854. In 1855, using Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s two books on the Indian tribes of North America as the base and the trochaic metrics of the Finnish epic Kalevala as his medium, he fashioned The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Its appeal to the public was immediate. Hiawatha is an Ojibwa Indian who, after various mythic feats, becomes his people’s leader and marries Minnehaha before departing for the Isles of the Blessed. Both the poem and its singsong metre have been frequent objects of parody.