"Young Goodman Brown" was published in 1835, when Nathaniel Hawthorne was 31 years old. Hawthorne was born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, a village still steeped in 17th-century Puritanism. When he was four, Hawthorne's father died, and from then on he was surrounded mostly by women: two sisters, a maiden aunt, and a retired mother who was not close to her children. He had little contact with his deceased father's family, but his maternal relatives supported him and made sure he attended college, the first in his family to do so (Turner 33). During his four years of college, despite his reclusive nature, he established close friendships with his male classmates, many of whom he maintained throughout his life. These four years of shared human companionship were contrasted by the next twelve years of self-imposed isolation spent upstairs in her mother's house in Salem, trying to master the art of writing. It was during those twelve years of seclusion, while researching local New England history for use in his fiction, that Hawthorne made a startling discovery. His 17th-century paternal ancestors, who he believed to have been farmers or seafarers, had been prominent Puritan political and religious founders and leaders of Salem. "Young Goodman Brown" was influenced by this Puritan legacy; by the personality of Hawthorne who had acquired a skeptical and dual vision of life; and by Hawthorne's mental and moral convictions revealed by him. Hawthorne struggles with his own morality within his own biographical structure in “Young Goodman Brown.” Hawthorne viewed his Puritan ancestors with a mixture of pride and guilt. He felt proud to see his family's history in the middle of the paper: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Canby, Henry Seidel. Classic Americans: A Study of Eminent American Writers from Irving to Whitman. New York: Russell and Russell, 1939. Donaldson, Scott and Ann Massa. American literature: 19th and early 20th centuries. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. Fogle, Richard Harter. The Hawthorne Fiction: The Light and the Darkness. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1952. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown." 1835. Heath's Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter et al. 2nd ed. vol. 1. Lexington: Heath, 1944. 2129-38.Johnson, Claudia D. The Productive Tension of Hawthorne's Art. University: U of Alabama P, 1981.Turner, Arlin. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New York: Oxford UP, 1980. Ziff, Larzer. Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America. New York: Viking Press, 1981.