Salem never had a stranger child than Nathaniel Hawthorne. His family staunch Puritan on both sides, young Nathaniel showed his artistic temperament from the start, prompting him to rebel against family tradition and develop his own special, sensitive genius.

It is a fascinating story, as Miss Hawthorne tells it, embellished with many incidents of Hawthorne's youth, never before published. Here is biography instinct with life. Leaving for others the critical appraisal of her grandfather's prolific writings, Miss Hawthorne concentrates on the personal story.

As Albert Bigelow Paine says in his foreword: "Hawthorne steps from his dream world into something approaching reality. It is all so well and warmly told. In these pages his story becomes our story,—his failures and his victories."

With the sure touch of an artist, the story unfolds: Hawthorne's youth in the Maine woods and at Bowdoin College, the years of seclusion when he destroyed everything he wrote, living a "shadow among shadows," his meeting with the fragile Sophia Peabody and their strange romance so like that of the Barrett-Brownings whom they were to know intimately in Florence, social ostracism in Salem after "The Scarlet Letter," years of residence abroad. It is a moving panorama which includes many distinguished literary figures of the nineteenth century.

Romantic Rebel will appeal especially to older boys and girls and to many adults. 

From the dust jacket