Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist born in 1804 in the United States who died in 1864 in England. He studied at Bowdoin College where he met other famous poets and writers. After publishing his first book, he moved to Boston where he married and settled in Concord, Massachusetts near other writers. He is best known for his novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, which were part of the Romantic period focusing on allegory and Puritan ideas of the time.