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Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to a family that had been prominent in the area since colonial times. An ancestor, John Hathorne, had been one of the Magistrates who presided over the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692. Hawthorne believed his family to have been shamed by John Hathorne's actions in the witchcraft trials. To distance himself from this ancestor, Hawthorne changed his last name, adding a "w." Hawthorne’s sensitivity to Puritan excesses …

…ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and had a fascination with the exotic, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, and the diseased. The Romantic movement in literature took hold in Europe, the United States, and Latin America and lasting from about 1750 to about 1870. Romanticism not only affected literature but spread to painting, music, and architecture. Words and phrases: puritanism, predestination, repentance, hypocrisy, magistrate, beadle, martyr, illegitimate, imp; retribution, scaffold, ghastly, ransomed, piety.