Julian Hawthorne

Julian Hawthorne, the son of novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, was born in Boston, MA, in 1846. The family moved to Liverpool, England, where his father was American consul, when Julian was seven.

In 1863 he returned to the US, enrolling in the Lowell Scientific School at Harvard University, after which he returned to Europe to do postgraduate work at a polytechnic school in Dresden, Germany.

In 1870 he returned to the US and took a position as a hydrographic engineer for the city of New York's Docks Department. Four years later, however, he left the US again, this time to take a position as a staff writer on "The Spectator" magazine in London, where he spent seven years. He began writing novels, but found it difficult to escape comparisons to his famous father, and soon acquired a reputation for being capricious and irritable, seeking to shock critics with the subject matters of his works. He averaged writing three to four books a year and one of them, "A Fool of Nature"--written using the pseudonym "Judith Hollinshed"--won a $10,000 prize offered by the New York Herald, which then hired him as an investigative reporter and sent him to India to cover a famine and plague devastating the country.

By 1900 he had decided to give up writing fiction, and concentrated on history, short stories and syndicated columns and articles. He also wrote several books based on the experiences of Inspector Byrnes, a renowned New York City detective.

In 1912 he was sentenced to serve one year at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for his part in promoting stock in worthless gold mines. He was paroled after serving several months of his one-year sentence and relocated to California, where he soon learned the national publicity over the affair had severely damaged his career.

In 1913 he was sentenced to one year in prison for his involvement in a scheme that sold stock in worthless gold mines. He entered the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary on March 26, but served only several months before he was released, after which he left for California. He was hired by the Pasadena (CA) Star-News, where he spent 17 years as the editor of the Book page.

Was acquainted with a good number of the literary greats of the late 19th and early 20th century.