Description
This book demonstrates how Nathaniel Hawthornes lifelong friendship with Franklin Pierce influenced the authors literary imagination, often prompting him to transform Pierce from his historical personage into a romanticized figure of distinctly Jacksonian qualities. The book also examines how Hawthornes friendship with Pierce profoundly influenced a wide range of his work, from his first novel, Fanshawe (1828), to the Life of Franklin Pierce (1852) and such later works as the unfinished Septimius romances and the dedicatory materials in Our Old Home (1863). Finally, the book shows how Pierce became for Hawthorne a literary device an icon of Jacksonian virtue, a token of the Democratic party, and an emblem of steadfastness, military heroism, and integrity, all three of which were often at odds with Pierces historical character.
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