The Man of Adamant

The Man of Adamant is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in his Snow Image and Other Twice Told Tales collection of 1851. The story is one of his more directly moral allegories, with the central premise involving Richard Digby, a religious zealot who has decided that he is the only person who has correctly understood the Christian faith and that everyone else is fundamentally in error.

Digby retreats from human society to live in a remote cave, where he plans to spend the rest of his life in isolation as the only true believer in the world. The story follows his slow physical and spiritual transformation in the cave, with his stony heart and rigid certainty literally turning his body into the adamant of the title. Hawthorne uses the allegorical premise to develop a sharp critique of the kind of religious zealotry that takes the conviction of being right to the point of cutting off all human community and connection.

The story is one of Hawthorne’s clearer engagements with the legacy of Puritanism and with the dangers of the kind of rigid religious certainty that the Puritan tradition had sometimes produced. Hawthorne was the descendant of Puritan settlers in Salem, Massachusetts, and his fiction repeatedly returned to the moral and historical legacy of his Puritan ancestors. The Man of Adamant develops the critique in compressed allegorical form.

For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, The Man of Adamant shows him at his most directly engaged with the religious themes that his major fiction also worked through. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the story is essential.