In the first literary/biographical study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s career in almost 40 years, Robert Milder, professor of English, gives a transatlantic perspective on the American author. Making use of Hawthorne’s letters and notebooks, Milder details how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and the American Renaissance impacted the writer. Milder also discusses the influence of Hawthorne’s time in England, where he served five years as consul in Liverpool, and in Italy.