About the Meeting
Welcome to the 2010 Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Summer Meeting
The June 10–13, 2010, Nathaniel Hawthorne Summer Meeting, titled "Hawthorne in Concord: Eden and Beyond," concerns the author's life and works during his three residences in this legendary town: 1842–45 (The Old Manse), 1852–53, and 1860–64 (The Wayside). These periods represent the arc of his maturity, from the joy of his early married life—"We are happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous"—and his tremendous productivity—the great short stories to be collected in Mosses from The Old Manse—to the illness and artistic uncertainty of his final years.
Our summer meeting will illuminate his time in Concord, focusing on Hawthorne's family, his friendships, his writings, and his relationship to the larger context from Transcendentalism, to Abolitionism, to the Civil War. We will meet at Concord's Colonial Inn to listen, to talk, to learn, and to enjoy the community of fellow Hawthorne scholars and aficionados.
The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society holds a summer meeting every two years; in recent times, we have met in Salem, Massachusetts; Oxford, England (with the Poe Studies Association and the Emerson Society); and in Brunswick, Maine. We met in Concord in 1992, 1994, and 1996.
One visitor to the Hawthornes in The Old Manse, a girl named Annie Sawyer, later wrote that "Hawthorne was the least known, least accessible of all the Concord notables." We are delighted to return to Concord to try to get to know him better. And if we succeed, perhaps we might well recall William Dean Howells's satisfying visit to Hawthorne at The Wayside—and Hawthorne's writing on his card, by way of introducing Howells to Emerson, "I find this young man worthy."
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