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The accepted version of Hawthorne's life has too long blurred the absurdities and humiliations of his political career, the job-seeking, the deals, the mistakes, the lost election. The power of Hawthorne's fiction was not, after all, the result of a strong, secluded imagination; it came from an awareness of what was happening in the U.S. in his own time, a hard knowledge won by his own work and by his association with people who were trying, with little success, to control events.