"In addition to the universal problem of trying to eke out a bare subsistence
on a modest income, like many novelists, Hawthorne faced the matter of national
condescension and prejudice. In the view of the general English reader of
the time, and especially in the mind of the educated English aristocracy,
America (artistically speaking) was a raw frontier inhabited by bumpkins too
insufficiently refined or insufficiently buttressed by long literary [and
artistic] traditions to produce great art" ( 174).
