Probably no classic American author is more closely associated with a single place than Hawthorne is with Salem, Massachusetts. Born there (in 1804), raised there, except for summers in Maine, he returned there after college (at Bowdoin) in Maine and lived a quiet, some would say a reclusive life there from 1825 to 1837. Salem was his ancestral home, infamous for the witch trials of 1692, about which he wrote more than once, and for his great-great grandfather's involvement in which he seemed now and then to be doing penance. In “Young Goodman Brown,” most famously, but also in the curious story called “Alice Doane's Appeal” in which the tangled question of Satan's power to appear in the guise of human beings is explored for the morose delectation of some innocent (and ignorant) latter-day inhabitants of that fateful little village.

Later on, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)— more popular in his century than in ours— was set there, self-consciously, and as knowledgeably as The Scarlet Letter (1850) is set in John Winthrop's Boston; and many readers find the Salem “Custom House” preface to that historical masterpiece quite as memorable as any of its studied references to the site of Puritanism's capital city. Indeed, undergraduates often tell you that Hester Prynne is ostracized from Salem. Less well known, perhaps, a dramatic sketch called “Main-street” (1849) offers us a selective and, as it turns out, a truncated history of that very town, displeasing an internally represented audience, and offering a well-considered and carefully crafted revision of the more patriotic account then in print. The audience is not amused. Given all this, it may strike us as significant when a Narrator, pretty close to Hawthorne “himself,” in his bio-satiric sketch on what it was like to work at and be fired from the customs house of that city, declares himself henceforth “a citizen of somewhere else.” Literally, at the moment any contemporary could read that querulous valedictory, Hawthorne was living in Lenox in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, where he wrote both The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance— and where, as it turns out, he would meet and become, for a time at least, good friends with Herman Melville. And, having shaken the dust off his feet, he would never again take up residence in his ancestral Salem.