单项选择题

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804. Hawthorne’s father was a sea captain. He died of fever when Hawthorne was only four. Hawthorne’s childhood was not particularly abnormal, as many famous authors have claimed to have. Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College and graduated after four years. After graduation, he returned to Salem. Contrary to his family’s expectations, Hawthorne did not begin to read law or enter business, rather he moved into his mother’s house to turn himself into a writer.
Hawthorne’s first novel, Fanshawe, was published anonymously in 1828 at his own expense. Because of a lack of sales, Hawthorne recalled every copy he could find of the book and destroyed them. When a local printer delayed publishing his Seven Tales of My Native Land, Hawthorne withdrew the manuscript and burned it in a mood half-savage, half-despairing. He had destroyed other stories before publication because he thought they were "morbid." In 1837, at the age of thirty-two, Hawthorne published his first collection, Twice-Told Tales. Longfellow, the most popular poet of the day, gave it a flattering review. New York magazine editors read it and offered him jobs.
Two years later, Hawthorne married Sophia. Hawthorne soon realized that supporting a wife was not as easy as he anticipated it to be. He could never manage it by Writing stories, so he decided to leave Salem for a political appointment as measurer of coal and salt in the Boston customhouse. The contrast between his old ways and this new way of life was a shock for Hawthorne. He had hoped to discover what "reality" was like as well as earn a respectable salary, and he gave it a try. After two years, however, he resigned from this "very grievous thralldom." Then Hawthorne moved to Concord, Massachusetts.
Hawthorne produced more than twenty tales during three years in Concord, sold them to magazines, and then collected them in Mosses from an Old Manse. His reputation was growing. It took Hawthorne a return to Salem to bring him fame. After three years of dealing with the dullness of the work as a surveyor in the Salem customhouse, he was fired for political reasons. His wife comforted him by saying, "Now you can write your book." In seven months it was finished. In April 1850, The Scarlet Letter was published. Hawthorne called this book "positively a hell-fired story, into which I found it ahnost impossible to throw any cheering light." Some contemporary critics called it "America’s first tragedy". The last fourteen years of Hawthorne’s life were very different from the struggle to be recognized that his entire life had been about. Within a year Hawthorne finished and published another novel named The House of Seven Gables; a story about a Pyncheon family of Salem and Maule’s curse. A year later he published The Blithedale Romance, a satire of Brook Farm. After seven years in Europe, he tried an even more ambitious novel, The Marble Faun. Sadly, none of these novels reached the acclaim that The Scarlet Letter had with critics.
Which of the following is NOT stated or implied in the passage