e failure, while Hawthorne's last completed romance The Marble Faun (1860), in which an innocent young man falls into sin and rises into maturity met with only moderate success. Hawthorne died in 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire, on a trip with former president Pierce, intended to benefit his health. Hawthorne has remained an enigma to his biographers. Biographers who study the outward aspects of life tend to portray him as a thoroughly normal and well-adjusted man. Those in the study of inward life show that the well-adjusted Hawthorne was a man that he would have liked to be.
             Hawthorne was ruthless in his fictional portrayals of the merciless puritan magistrates, those who were upholders of dour orthodoxy, hot in pursuit of witches and heretics. Critic Deborah Madsen, an English professor at South Bank University in England, argues that Hawthorne did the Puritan and one colonial family, his own, injustice. "William Hathorne, says Madsen, was a notorious persecutor of Quakers, operating a system of spies or informers who reported to him individuals who neglected their church and civil duties."(Korobkin) Hathorne's son, John, was the infamous "hanging" judge of the Salem Witchcraft trials of 1692. After The House of Seven Gables appeared in 1851, telling of the cursed Pyncheon family, Hawthorne acknowledged, in response to complaints from members of a Pynchon family, that the Pyncheon name had been inspired by the name of their ancestor, Judge William Pynchon, one of the 26 patentees of the Massachusetts Bay Company and founder of Springfield, Massachusetts. Later in 1650, Judge Pynchon was found guilty of heresy in connection with a book he had written about Christ and redemption, and arranged to return to England with his wife. "How odd then, suggests Madsen, that novelist Hawthorne paid no heed to the fact Judge Pynchon was cut from very different cloth than his ancestors, something of a thorn i...