Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), Nathaniel Hawthorne's only son, lived a
long and influential life marked by bad circumstances and worse choices.
Raised among luminaries such as Thoreau, Emerson, and the Beecher
family, Julian became a promising novelist in his twenties, but his
writing soon devolved into mediocrity.
What talent the young Hawthorne had was spent chasing across the
changing literary and publishing landscapes of the period in search of a
paycheck, writing everything from potboilers to ad copy. Julian was
consistently short of funds because--as biographer Gary Scharnhorst is
the first to reveal--he was supporting two households: his wife in one
and a longtime mistress in the other.
The younger Hawthorne's name and work ethic gave him influence in spite
of his haphazard writing. Julian helped to found Cosmopolitan and
Collier's Weekly. As a Hearst stringer, he covered some of the era's
most important events: McKinley's assassination, the Galveston
hurricane, and the Spanish-American War, among others.
When Julian died at age 87, he had written millions of words and more
than 3,000 pieces, out-publishing his father by a ratio of twenty to
one. Gary Scharnhorst, after his own long career including works on Mark
Twain, Oscar Wilde, and other famous writers, became fascinated by the
leaps and falls of Julian Hawthorne. This biography shows why.
