In this pleasing biography, seasoned American history writer McFarland (The Brave Bostonians
) focuses on two elements that defined New England as the center of America's 19th-century literary world: the village of Concord, Mass. (a center for luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott), and the blue-eyed "recluse" able to see "evil in every human heart," Nathaniel Hawthorne. McFarland focuses on the people and ideas that shaped the era as it moved from early industrialization to the turmoil of the Civil War. His short chapters lend themselves to portraits, of politicians Henry Clay and James Knox Polk, and thinkers Horace Mann and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others. Aspects of Hawthorne's everyday life are stressed, such as his constant money concerns, which in the 1840s sent him, with his wife and daughter, back to live with his mother and sister, and 20 years later still left him thinking, "I wonder how people manage to live economically." The physical precariousness of 19th-century life is also revealed, in the many examples of diseases and drownings within Hawthorne's family and community. The writer's meaningful friendships are well drawn, particularly with his college chum and future president, Franklin Pierce, to whom he displayed his loyalty by writing a campaign biography. In the end, by depicting his subject's three sojourns in Concord, McFarland illuminates Hawthorne's art and the intellectual ferment originating in that small, bucolic town. (July)
