Hawthorne's View of the Artist

The Hawthorne depicted by Professor Bell in these pages will be as much of a surprise to many readers as is his appearance in the rare 1847 daguerreotype reproduced on the book-jacket. “This virtually unknown portrait,” says the author, “corresponds with Samuel Goodrich’s description, in 1856, of the New England writer: ...‘his hair dark and bushy, his eye steel gray, his brow thick, his mouth sarcastic, his whole aspect cold, moody, distrustful....At this period...he had tried his hand in literature and considered himself to have met with a fatal rebuff from the reading world’” (pp. 92-93). His sensitiveness to the predicament of the artist in early-nineteenth-century America—when the rush for power, money, and social prestige relegated creative talent to the dustbin—filled Hawthorne’s writings with penetrating statements about the artist’s fate in the new scientific, industrial world, statements still applicable today.