Hawthorne and His Circle

Nathaniel Hawthorne at home, by the son who grew up in the house: Concord, the consulate at Liverpool, Rome, and the men who came to dinner — Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Franklin Pierce. Julian Hawthorne wrote for fifty years and later went to prison for mail fraud over a mining stock, which tells you something about his judgement and nothing about his ear. Nobody else heard these people talk. Sixty plates of American painting, from Cole and Bierstadt to Whistler, 1826 to 1901, catch the landscapes and portraits of the world these men moved through.