Robert Mead in his Literature of the American Nation wrote that Hawthorne, alone, sat in the old library reading, absorbing the history of his family and "the somber calamities of the seventeenth-century founders with their Indian wars and terror of witchcraft."
Hawthorne returned to Salem with the goal of becoming a writer, leaving his home only for his daily long walks. He "disappeared like a stone dropped into a well."
The years after leaving Bowdoin can be considered a "literary apprenticeship," a time of reading and writing.
At Bowdoin, he became acquainted with the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the future president Franklin Pierce.
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