Many of the posts on Clay Lane are by well known writers such as William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Others are by less well known authors who have something no less important to say.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is best known today for his novel The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850. Nathaniel was born in Salem, Massachusetts to a family who traced their ancestry back to English emigrants who left Wiltshire in 1630, and the pilgrim fathers held a fascination for him all his life. He determined at an early age that a career as an author was the only one open to him, since (as he wrote to his mother) ‘I do not want to be a doctor and live by men’s diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels’. In 1842 he married Sophia Peabody and settled at Concord in Massachusetts, where he wrote The House of the Seven Gables and Tanglewood Tales, and where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau completed a distinguished literary neighbourhood. Nathaniel and Sophia had three children together.
