He became good friends of two Transcendentalist writers of the period -- Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He also taught the only other Anti-Transcendentalist writer of his period -- Herman Melville. His most popular book, The Scarlet Letter, earned Hawthorne international fame. The period of time during which Hawthorne wrote was the New England Renaissance in America. By the year 1840, it was clear that the American experiment in Democracy had succeeded. England, trying again to retake their old land in 'The Second

American War for Independence', was no longer a threat to the survival of the republic. Andrew Jackson, the first "people's president", had served 2 terms in office. New states were entering the Union. One French observer stated that Americans had, "a lively faith in the predictability of man", and that they, "admit that what appears to them today to be good may be superseded by something better tomorrow." There were two types of writing styles during Hawthorne's life -- Transcendentalism and Anti-Transcendentalism. Many of the authors of the period were influenced by the transcendental movement, which was flourishing at the time. Transcendentalists believed that intuition and the individual conscience transcend experience and were therefore better guides to truth than are the senses and logical reason. They respected the individual spirit and the natural world, believing that divinity was present everywhere. Anti-Transcendentalists, like Hawthorne and his apprentice Melville, focused instead on the limitations and potential destructiveness of the human spirit, rather than on it's possibilities. The major reason that Hawthorne was an Anti-Transcendentalist was that, haunted by the cruelty and intolerance of his Puritan ancestors, Hawthorne viewed evil as one of

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