Panel: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Friends

Gould’s essay, “Hawthorne and the State of War,” reads the under-studied travel memoir Our Old Home (1863) as a meditation on the important—and, as he saw it, troubling—transformation of state power during the US Civil War. Balcerski’s essay, “‘A Work of Friendship’: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Franklin Pierce, and the Politics of Literary History,” traces the evolution of their conjoined personal and political friendship from 1852 to 1864 and argues for its significance during this final phase of their public lives.