Brenda Wineapple, the Washington Irving Professor of Modern Literary and
Historical Studies, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to
continue work on a biography she is writing on Nathaniel Hawthorne.
This is the second NEH Fellowship she has received. The first came in 1986-87 in
support of her first biography, Genêt: A Biography on Janet Flanner about the New
Yorker correspondent who chronicled 20th-century
Paris.
Among her awards, Wineapple also has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American
Council on Learned Societies Fellowship, a Hertog Fellowship from the Columbia University
Writing Program, a Ball Brothers Foundation Fellowship from Indiana University, and a
Donald C. Gallup Senior Fellowship from Yale University.
She also is author of Sister Brother Gertrude and Leo Stein (1997).
It has been a challenge, she says, to write about “someone canonical” like
Hawthorne, but adds that the project has given her “a certain kind of freedom.”
Enough is known about Hawthorne that she doesn't have to convince anyone of his
importance or put his life into context, she explains. And unlike Janet Flanner and
Gertrude and Leo Stein — subjects of her first two biographies — Hawthorne is
“more dead,” so there are no living contemporaries to interview.
Hawthorne descendants, however, have supplied a wealth of information, much of it
unseen, including a trunk-full of letters to and from the 19th-century author.