About the Meeting

The 2008 Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Summer Meeting at Bowdoin College is aptly called “Nathaniel Hawthorne: Starting Over,” for Hawthorne attended Bowdoin (class of 1825), met lifelong friends there, and set his novel Fanshawe (1828) there. Bowdoin was thus the site of a new beginning for him personally and an inspiration for his writing. 

 

This summer meeting will concern, by analogy, Hawthorne and a range of new beginnings, from the professional and familial to the critical and pedagogical. Scholars and aficionados of Hawthorne’s novels and stories will come together to talk, listen, and learn in the collegial community and among the pines that Hawthorne himself enjoyed.

 

The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society hosts a conference biennially; in 2004 the organization paid tribute to Hawthorne’s bicentennial in Salem, Massachusetts, and in 2006 the group joined with the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society and the Poe Studies Association in Oxford, England. In 2008 our society is delighted to return to Brunswick, Maine, where readers will honor his work as our speakers work in his honor.

 

Fifty years after the graduation of Bowdoin’s class of 1825, classmate John S. C. Abbott remembered Hawthorne this way: “. . . there was an aspect of silent pensiveness spread over his features, which arrested the eye and led one to inquire, ‘Who is that young man?’” We invite all those who wish to continue that inquiry—and who cherish Hawthorne’s achievements—to join us for this literary celebration.

 

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Page last modified on Monday, March 23, 2009