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Birthmarks; How a cursed genius reckoned with the sins of his forefathers.

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From: The Washington Post
Date: 20031019
Author:Reviewed by Justin Kaplan.

HAWTHORNE: A Life

By Brenda Wineapple. Knopf. 509 pp. $30

The Nathaniel Hawthorne who comes to life in the pages of Brenda Wineapple's fine biography is a model of heroic persistence. He was haunted by the dark history of his forebears, among them two magistrates, both hanging judges. One persecuted heretics, illegal fornicators and Quakers, while the other presided over the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. But the same dark history drove Hawthorne's explorations of the Puritan conscience in the novels and stories that established him as one of the great masters of American prose fiction. For ...

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