Hawthorne, Nathaniel

   (1804–1864).

   American novelist and short story writer. Hawthorne was a central figure in early Gothic literature in America and a major influence on HPL, who at the age of six first developed a fascination with Graeco-Roman mythology by reading Hawthorne’s rewritings of Greek myths, A Wonder Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853). The House of the Seven Gables (1851) — which HPL in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” deemed “New England’s greatest contribution to weird literature” — probably influenced HPL’s “The Picture in the House” (1920), “The Shunned House” (1924), and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927). “The Outsider” (1921) may in part have been inspired by Hawthorne’s “Fragments from the Journal of a Solitary Man.” HPL’s The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926– 27) shows the influence of both Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) and his short story “The Great Stone Face” (in The Snow Image, and Other Twice-told Tales[1852]); “The Dreams in the Witch House” (1932) was heavily influenced by Hawthorne’s unfinished novel Septimius Felton, as “The Unnamable” (1923) was by Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret(1883).

   See Dirk W.Mosig, “Poe, Hawthorne and Lovecraft: Variations on a Theme of Panic,” RomantistNos. 4–5 (1980–81): 43–45; Donald R.Burleson, “H. P. Lovecraft: The Hawthorne Influence,” Extrapolation 22, No. 3 (Fall 1981): 262–69.