The Marble Faun (1860) was the last of the four major romances by Nathaniel Hawthorne. After writing The Blithedale Romance in 1852, Hawthorne, approaching fifty, turned away from publication and obtained a political appointment as American Consul in Liverpool, England, an appointment which he held from 1853 to 1857. In 1858, Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia Peabody, moved to Italy and became, essentially, tourists for a year and a half.
In the spring of 1858, Hawthorne was inspired to write his romance when he saw the Faun of Praxiteles in a Roman sculpture gallery.
The Marble Faun is Hawthorne's most unusual romance, and possibly one of the strangest major works of American fiction. Writing on the eve of the American Civil War, Hawthorne set his story in a fantastical Italy. The romance mixes elements of a fable, pastoral, gothic novel, and travel guide. The climax comes less than halfway through the story, and Hawthorne intentionally fails to answer many of a reader's questions about the characters and the plot. (Complaints about this led Hawthorne to add a facetious Postscript to the second edition, wherein he continues to fail - purposefully - to answer most of these questions.) Its theme, characteristic of Hawthorne, is guilt and the Fall of Man. The four main characters are Miriam, a beautiful art student who is compared to Eve, Beatrice Cenci, Lady Macbeth, Judith, and Cleopatra, and is being pursued by a mysterious, threatening Model; Hilda, an innocent painter who is compared to the Virgin Mary; Kenyon, a sculptor, who represents rationalist humanism; and Donatello, the Count of Monti Beni, who is compared to Adam, resembles the Faun of Praxiteles, and is probably only half human.
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