A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Minister's Black Veil"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Minister's Black Veil," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535828635

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The Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable

Nathaniel Hawthorne

1836

Introduction

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil first appeared in 1836 in the journal the Token. It was published anonymously, along with several other tales that Hawthorne had submitted. These tales met with critical acclaim, and their anonymous author, writing of unique American experiences, was praised as a genius. In 1837 The Minister’s Black Veil was included in Twice Told Tales, a collection of short stories published under Hawthorne’s own name.

Author Biography

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, the second of three children born to Nathaniel and Elizabeth Hathorne. (Their son added the w to the family name when he began his writing career.) In 1808, his father, a ship’s captain, died of yellow fever in the distant port of Surinam. Shortly thereafter, four-year-old Nathaniel moved with his mother and two sisters, Elizabeth and Maria Louisa, from their home on Union Street to the house next door belonging to the Mannings, his mother’s family. In the Manning household, Hawthorne’s keen intelligence was noted and nurtured; in fact, his maternal relatives hoped that he would eventually attend college. At the age of sixteen, Hawthorne demonstrated a flair for journalism when he wrote and printed the Spectator-an intra-family newsletter he wrote with his sister that functioned as a kind of correspondence between the Mannings in Salem and an uncle who was overseeing the family lands in Raymond, Maine.

In 1821, Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in Maine, and he proved to be a competent, but not always industrious, scholar. While there, he became acquainted with Franklin Pierce, who would later become the fourteenth president of the United States. Another classmate of Hawthorne’s was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, soon to be one of America’s most acclaimed poets. As his time at Bowdoin drew to a close, Hawthorne wrote a letter to his mother expressing his lack of enthusiasm for the professions of law and medicine. He proposed that he should become a writer, asking his mother to imagine the pride she would experience at seeing his name in print and at hearing his works generally praised.

After graduating from Bowdoin in 1825, Hawthorne returned to the Manning residence and lived a life of relative isolation that lasted for some eleven years. During this period he wrote Fanshawe, a novel that took as its subject matter his days at Bowdoin, and published it at