October 31, 2003: Volume 59, Number 8

Prof. Wineapple to talk on 'Hawthorne and Politics of Writing'

Brenda Wineapple, author of the new biography, Hawthorne: A Life, will talk on "Hawthorne and the Politics of Writing" on Monday, Nov. 3, at 7 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.

Wineapple's new book has been widely reviewed, and the author has had a number of interviews. She is scheduled to appear shortly on C-SPAN's Booknotes.

Wineapple, who joined the Union faculty in 1976, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. She has written two other biographies: Genêt, about New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner, and Sister Brother, about the relationship of Gertrude and Leo Stein.

Despite the fact that Hawthorne was one of America's most famous writers, by the time of his death in 1864 he sensed that history had passed him by. With massive armies mobilized in a civil war that he strongly opposed, his many stories and novels set in the distant past seemed beside the point. His close friendship with a widely discredited former U.S. president, Franklin Pierce, only seemed to confirm his irrelevancy.

Hawthorne, a descendant of a 17th-century Salem magistrate who hanged accused witches by the score, has much to tell us about the terror-spawning religious fanaticism of our own time, according to Wineapple. "No one conveys better than Hawthorne how religion and ideology can induce hysteria, violence, and cruelty," she says.

The first female biographer of Hawthorne, Prof. Wineapple was attracted to him initially because he was the first major American writer to make women central figures in his novels. His contempt for women writers notwithstanding, "I knew the creator of Hester Prynne had to be a feminist...and wanted to be the first to plumb his relationships with the many women who were important to him."

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