Ministers Black Veil - Poverty in the Tale and in the Life of the Auth

The Ministers Black Veil Poverty in the Tale and in the Life of the write Henry Seidel Canby in A Skeptic Incompatible with His Time and His Past mentions of Hawthorne that human failures and their causes were more interesting to him than prophecies of achiever, one might truly say than success itself. He was not, I think, really interested in escape, except in moods of financial discouragement. . . . (57). Nathaniel Hawthornes The Ministers Black Veil embodies traits of the modest life style which the author had to subject himself to because of inadequate finances through most of his life. In addition to the monetary impoverishment there was an additional artistic impoverishment which sorely restricted the materials from which he could choose for his literary works. Hawthornes impoverishment probably began with the untimely death of his father, and continued until 1857. He had no money for a college education. Gloria C. Erlich in The Divided Artist and His Uncles states tha t Robert Manning made the essential decisions in the lives of the Hawthorne children and is well known as the uncle who sent Hawthorne to college (35). After graduation from Bowdoin College Hawthorne spent twelve years in his room at home in an intense effort to make something of himself literarily. The Norton Anthology American Literature states Hawthornes years between 1825 and 1837 have fascinated his biographers and critics. Hawthorne himself took song to propagate the notion that he had lived as a hermit who left his upstairs room only for nighttime walks and hardly communicated even with his mother and sisters (547). Sculley Bradley, capital of Virginia Croom Beatty and E. Hudson Long in The Soc... ..., 1996. Erlich, Gloria C. The Divided Artist and His Uncles. In Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Clarice Swisher. San Diego, CA Greenhaven Press, 1996. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Young Goodman Brown. 1835. http//www.cwrl.utexas.edu/daniel/amlit/goodman/goodmantext.html James, Henry. Hawthorne. http//eldred.ne.mediaone.net/nh/nhhj1.html Lewis, R. W. B. The Return into Time Hawthorne. In Hawthorne A disposition of Critical Essays, edited by A.N. Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Norton Anthology American Literature, edited by Baym et al. New York W.W. Norton and Co., 1995. Swisher, Clarice. Nathaniel Hawthorne a Biography. In Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Clarice Swisher. San Diego, CA Greenhaven Press, 1996.