After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1825, 21-year-old Nathaniel Hawthorne returned to his family home in Salem, Massachusetts, to live with his mother and two sisters.
Over the next two decades, the aspiring author took on just two short-term jobs. Otherwise, he spent much of his time as a recluse: reading, taking long walks in Salem, socializing with a small group of friends, and writing stories and sketches from the third-story bedroom of the home he called “Castle Dismal.” During that period and beyond, Hawthorne kept a series of notebooks, which scholars see as an important primary source for understanding the ideas and descriptions that informed his early writings and later novels.
