Which American author wrote the short story ‘Footprints on the Seashore’?

The American author who wrote the short story ‘Footprints on the Seashore was Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864). He experimented with a broad range of styles and genres throughout his literary life, perhaps considered one of the great American 19th century Romantic novelists. He was educated at Bowdoin College where he was a student from 1821-1824.

Along with Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe, much of Hawthorne’s writing belongs to the sub-genre called ‘Dark Romanticism’, distinguished by an emphasis on human fallibility that gives rise to lapses in judgement that allow even good men and women to drift toward sin and self-destruction. Dark Romantics tended to draw attention to the unintended consequences and complications that arise from well-intentioned efforts at social reform.

The opening line of this short-story reads, “It must be a spirit much unlike my own which can keep itself in health and vigor without sometimes stealing from the sultry sunshine of the world to plunge into the cool bath of solitude.”

The short story can be been summarized as a reflection account of a typical solitary walk along the beach, complete with observations of seagulls, crabs and the waters’ tide, plus musings about the past, like murmurs of the sea that invite the narrator “to withdraw his interest from mortal vicissitudes, and let the infinite idea of eternity pervade his soul.”

Hawthorne died in his sleep during a tour of the White Mountains in Plymouth, New Hampshire.