Biographical Sketches

Biographical Sketches is the title of various nineteenth century volumes that collected short biographical pieces, and Nathaniel Hawthorne contributed to the genre across his career in various forms. Hawthorne wrote a number of biographical sketches and historical pieces that drew on the lives of historical figures from American and European history, with the sketches being published variously in periodicals, in collected volumes of his shorter work, and in stand alone publications aimed at particular audiences.

Hawthorne had a particular interest in early American history and in the various figures who had shaped the New England colonial period that his fiction so often returned to. His historical sketches often took up figures from the Puritan period, from the early American republic, and from the wider Atlantic world that the colonial and early national American story had been part of. The sketches functioned both as accessible biographical introductions for general readers and as occasions for Hawthorne to develop the historical and moral themes that his more famous fiction would also work through.

The biographical sketch as a literary form was particularly important in nineteenth century American letters. Without the kind of academic biographical infrastructure that twentieth century universities would later develop, the biographical sketches that established writers contributed to periodicals and to collected volumes provided the main accessible biographical literature that general readers had access to. Writers like Hawthorne, Washington Irving, James Russell Lowell, and others contributed substantially to this body of work, with the cumulative output shaping how educated nineteenth century Americans understood the historical figures of their own past and of the wider Western tradition.

Hawthorne’s biographical sketches are written in his characteristic prose style, with the careful observation, the attention to small details, and the willingness to let an essay tip into a tale and back again that distinguishes his shorter work. The sketches are more direct than his major fiction in their engagement with historical material but they share the same underlying moral and intellectual seriousness that distinguishes his major novels.

Readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables may find the biographical sketches slighter than they expect, but the historical sketch mode is one Hawthorne worked in throughout his career, and pieces like the various biographical sketches are part of the continuous body of work that the major novels grew out of. For students of nineteenth century American literature, of the development of the American biographical sketch tradition, or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the biographical sketches are worth knowing. The sketches are short and well suited to single sittings.