Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist, a dark romantic, and short story writer. The Marble Faun is Hawthorne`s awesome novel of Americans abroad, the first novel to explore the influence of European cultural ideas on American morality. Hawthorne is concerned here with the nature of transgression and guilt. A murder, motivated by love, affects not only Donatello, the murderer, but his beloved Miriam and their friends Hilda and Kenyon.