In 1853, when he was forty-nine and at the height of his literary career, Nathaniel Hawthorne accepted the post of U.S. consul at Liverpool, England, as a reward for writing the campaign biography of his college friend President Franklin Pierce. Hawthorne's departure for Europe marked a turning point in his life. While <i>Our Old Home</i>, shrewd essays on his observations in England, <i>The Marble Faun,</i> a romance set in Italy, and the <i>English Notebooks and French and Italian Notebooks were all results of his European residence, he returned to Concord in 1860 frustrated, depressed, and sick. He died in 1864.