He wrote numerous poems, novels, short stories, mysteries and detective fiction, essays, travel books, biographies, and histories.

[2] It was shortly after sunrise[3] and his father wrote to his sister: A small troglodyte made his appearance here at ten minutes to six o'clock, this morning, who claims to be your nephew and the heir of all our wealth and honors.

[7] His father used Julian as an inspiration for the character of Sweet Fern in his children's books A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood Tales.

He was tutored privately in German by James Russell Lowell, a professor and writer who encouraged Nathaniel Hawthorne's work.

Years later, he wrote of the incident: I was initiated into a college secret society—a couple of hours of grotesque and good-humored rodomontade and horseplay, in which I cooperated as in a kind of pleasant nightmare, confident, even when branded with a red-hot iron or doused head-over heels in boiling oil, that it would come out all right.

The neophyte is effectively blindfolded during the proceedings, and at last, still sightless, I was led down flights of steps into a silent crypt and helped into a coffin, where I was to stay until the Resurrection ...

[12]After his father's death, Hawthorne considered himself head of the household, quit Harvard, and abandoned his interest in joining the army.

He took over his father's study in the tower of The Wayside and, his mother recalled, the difficult time "made a man of him, for he feels all the care of me and his sisters".

His sister Rose, upon hearing of the book's announcement, had not known about the fragment and originally thought her brother was guilty of forgery or a hoax.

[15] In July 1883, Hawthorne was invited to participate as a lecturer at the Concord School of Philosophy by his former neighbors Amos Bronson Alcott and Sanborn.

Hawthorne presented a version of a paper he had recently published, "Agnosticism in American Fiction", which criticized the emerging American Realism movement and took aim particularly at William Dean Howells and Henry James, whose works Hawthorne believed represented "life and humanity not in their loftier, but in their lesser manifestations".

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.

Julian Hawthorne published an article in the October 24, 1886, issue of the New York World based on a long interview with James Russell Lowell, who had recently served as a U.S. diplomat to England.

[11] Between 1887 and 1888, Hawthorne published a series of detective fiction novels following the character Inspector Barnes, including The Great Bank Robbery, An American Penman, A Tragic Mystery, Section 558, and Another's Crime.

[21] Hawthorne was able to sell some three and a half million shares of stock in a nonexistent silver mine and served one year in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary.