Nathaniel Hawthorne was already a man of forty-six, and a tale writer of some twenty-four years' standing, when The Scarlet Letter appeared. He was born at Salem, Mass., on July 4th, 1804, son of a sea-captain. He led there a shy and rather somber life; of few artistic encouragements, yet not wholly uncongenial, his moody, intensely meditative temperament being considered. Its colors and shadows are marvelously reflected in his Twice-Told Tales and other short stories, the product of his first literary period. Even his college days at Bowdoin did not quite break through his acquired and inherited reserve; but beneath it all, his faculty of divining men and women was exercised with almost uncanny prescience and subtlety.