Idolatry

Julian Hawthorne (1846 - 1934) was an American writer and journalist, the son of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody. He wrote numerous poems, novels, short stories, mystery/detective fiction, essays, travel books, biographies and histories. As a journalist, he reported on the Indian Famine for Cosmopolitan magazine and the Spanish-American War for the New York Journal. Hawthorne wrote two books about his parents, called Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884-85) and Hawthorne and His Circle (1903). In the latter, he responded to a remark from his father's friend Herman Melville that the famous author had a "secret". Julian dismissed this, claiming Melville was inclined to think so only because "there were many secrets untold in his own career", causing much speculation. The younger Hawthorne also wrote a critique of his father's novel The Scarlet Letter that was published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1886.