Later, back in Salem again, he was employed as a Surveyor in the Salem Custom House until, losing his job for political reasons, he tried the experiment of devoting himself wholly to literature. Several happy years in the Old Manse in Concord (Emerson's ancestral home) brought him into contact with Emerson and Thoreau. Thereafter, anticipating the later American pattern, he was never to have a home which he could think of as permanent. After some ventures in editing and literary hackwork undertaken in an effort to support himself - the many stories he published in these years brought him little income - and after a brief period of employment in the Boston Custom House and another period as a member of the experimental socialist community at Brook Farm, Hawthorne married, at the age of thirty-eight, Miss Sophia Peabody. These early works were published anonymously.
For more than a decade he devoted himself to learning his craft, living at the family home, reading much, writing much, destroying many of his productions, but sending some of his stories to magazines and the popular "annuals," the Christmas gift-books of the time. When he was graduated in 1825, Hawthorne determined to become a writer of fiction.
He was sent to Bowdoin College by his uncles. The boy was brought up in the households of his mother's family in Salem and in the back country of Maine. (Hawthorne's feelings in this matter are part of the story of The House of the Seven Gables.) For several generations, Hawthorne's paternal ancestors followed the sea, while the family declined in wealth and social importance his father, Captain Hathorne (Hawthorne added the "w" to the spelling of the family name after he graduated from college), died at Surinam, Dutch Guiana, when his son was four years old. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, came from old New England stock in fact, one of his ancestors was a judge during the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-93.
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