Nathaniel Hawthorne
My name is Nathaniel Hawthorne. I was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in a place where the past was never wholly past, and where old sins seemed to linger in the air like a mist that no morning could entirely dispel. From my earliest years I felt the weight of inheritance: not only of name and family, but of conscience. The stern history of New England, with its judges, ministers, hidden guilt, public shame, and secret sorrow, furnished me not merely with subjects for tales, but with shadows in which the human soul might be more plainly seen. I wrote of men and women who bear invisible marks; of hearts divided between desire and duty; of innocence darkened by suspicion; of sin which society condemns loudly, while often hiding its own corruption beneath garments of respectability. For it seemed to me that the deepest drama of life is not always enacted before crowds, but in the silent chamber of conscience. In The Scarlet Letter, and in many other tales, I sought to show that guilt is not simple, punishment is not always justice, and the truth of a human being cannot be read only from the sign placed upon the breast. Between light and darkness, between mercy and judgment, between the living and the dead, I found the region where my imagination most naturally dwelt. If my writings are somber, it is because I looked closely at the soul; yet even there, amid shame and sorrow, I believed some tenderness might still survive.