The space that Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) occupies in American literature has fluctuated. It has never fallen to nothing, but in some decades his reputation was that of only slightly more than a historical artifact, while other decades have taken him as belonging at the center of American art. Adulatory letters from the likes of Herman Melville prove how seriously Hawthorne was taken in his own lifetime, especially after the extraordinary three-year run of novels he produced: “The Scarlet Letter” (1850), “The House of the Seven Gables” (1851), and “The Blithedale Romance” (1852). By the early 20th century, however, he seemed to have faded. Hemingway famously pointed to Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” (1884) as the foundational American novel, not Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter.”

The field of American Studies, emerging as a discipline in American colleges in the 1940s and 1950s, reemphasized the importance of the Puritans for understanding the nation’s intellectual history, and Hawthorne began to be appreciated once again — his short stories perhaps most of all, particularly such writings as “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1831), “Young Goodman Brown” (1835), and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844). 

That Hawthorne revival, however, died away in the turn to the 21st century, ground up by the twin motors of contemporary literary discourse: a demand that all the past be understood only through the lens of oppression (with American history a tale entirely of race and gender slavery), and an overwhelming presentism that sees the present as so much more enlightened than the past that only present works are worth discussing.

In other words, we need Nathaniel Hawthorne. We need the dial to turn one more time, restoring him to the center of American art. How else are we to understand the return of a bastard puritanism in the Woke movement? How else are we to grasp the psychological self-esteem that comes from an ostensible moral self-hatred?

And a place to start may be where Hawthorne himself started, with a poem he wrote when he was 16, published in his family’s amateur newspaper, The Spectator, in 1820. “Oh could I raise the darken’d veil” is twelve tetrameter lines, opening with an abab quatrain and finishing with four couplets. Its argument — that if offered a chance to see our future, we ought to refuse — is not original, but it is precocious for a 16-year-old boy. And it shows as well some of the themes that Hawthorne would develop in his mature work: the puzzles of time and memory, the melancholy that the intersections of past and future cause.