In 1821, Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Among his classmates were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who would become a distinguished poet and Harvard professor, and Franklin Pierce, future 14th president of the United States. Another classmate, Horatio Bridge, was later to offer a Boston publisher a guarantee against loss if he would publish Hawthorne’s first collection of short stories.
Hawthorne graduated middle of his class in 1825. Regarding his aspirations, he wrote, “I do not want to be a doctor and live by men’s diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So, I don’t see that there is anything left for me but to be an author.”
