The likeness of Nathaniel Hawthorne hanging in the AmLit museum resembles the shadowy, fading portrait of a distinguished ancestor. Yet, to my mind, The Scarlet Letter remains one of the three indispensable American novels of the nineteenth century, along with Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Now, biographer Brenda Wineapple, who tackled Leo and Gertrude Stein and Janet Flanner previously, has given us a scrupulous biography of Hawthorne that does a good deal to restore his portrait's original colors, while guiding readers back to the novels (The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun) and short stories (for example, "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," "Ethan Brand," "The Birth-mark") that shouldn't be left to gather dust. Wineapple has crafted a smart, revelatory portrait of a complex, contradictory, secretive man, an Adamic figure in American literature.

Hawthorne was one of the great conservatives of the national letters. In Wineapple's picture, the traits are there: skepticism of human motives; strong sense of sin; distrust of utopias and reformers; belief in what today's think-tank conservatives preach as the "law of unintended consequences" (government actions never turn out as planned; for example, the Iraq war); and, most important, obsession with the past.

Indeed, anyone who has read "The Custom-House," Hawthorne's preface to The Scarlet Letter, knows well his obsession with the sins of his actual forefathers. The founding Hathorne, as it was then spelled, Nathaniel's great-great-grandfather, William, settled in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1630s. A landowner, selectman and magistrate of the growing port town, he did the Lord's work as a scourge of heretical Quakers, one of whom, Ann Coleman, he ordered to be whipped around the streets half-naked.

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