Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was an American novelist and short-story writer from Salem, Massachusetts, whose ancestors included a judge at the witch trials. He spent a dozen obscure years writing tales before The Scarlet Letter (1850) made his name, and followed it with The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. His fiction returns persistently to guilt, secrecy and the moral inheritance of Puritan New England.