According to Julian Hawthorne, the novelist’s son, Herman Melville once said that “there was some secret in my father’s life which has never been revealed,” a secret that “accounted for the gloomy passages in his books.” Hawthorne’s lawyer, George Hillard, likewise read Hawthorne’s knowledge of “the morbid anatomy of the human heart” as evidence that he was “burdened with secret sorrow.” And Hawthorne’s sister Elizabeth (Ebe) Hawthorne also told Julian that “Your father kept his very existence a secret, as far as possible.”

All biographers have granted that Hawthorne was a deeply introspective, even introverted man who, for a dozen years after his college graduation from Bowdoin, kept pretty much to himself in Salem while he learned to write fiction. Afterward, he married Sophia Peabody, seemed sociable, fathered three children, published with great success, and became an esteemed public figure. Even so, Hawthorne was a true loner, a dark personality. While his marriage was without doubt one of the happiest and most celebrated in American literary history, even Sophia remarked after his death that “Such an unviolated sanctuary was his nature, I his inmost wife, never conceived of knew.”

Hawthorne’s friends and relations, then, pose him as a riddle, a man whose life was perhaps marked by an event that—like Young Goodman Brown’s encounter with evil—forever afterward permeated his life with gloom. Julian, who wrote the life of his father, ransacked the records and interrogated all of these friends and relatives but came up with nothing. His