One of the great writers in the flowering of American letters in the mid-19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was a much-lauded novelist and short-story writer whose work emphasized the human capacity for sin and evil. Through much of his life, he earned a living not through his writing but through a series of government jobs, culminating in the position of U.S. consul to Liverpool, which he was appointed to after his college friend Franklin Pierce became President of the United States.