Nathaniel Hawthorne is portrayed in a three-quarter seated bust CDV bearing the reverse imprint of Macullar, Parker & Co., Boston, showing the American novelist in middle age in a dark frock coat and waistcoat with a white shirt and large bow tie, holding what appears to be a small book or pamphlet in his left hand. Hawthorne faces the camera in a slight three-quarter turn, his dark hair neatly combed, a full mustache his only facial hair, and his expression composed and slightly withdrawn. The plain dark backdrop and careful tonal balance of the print are characteristic of high-quality studio work of the early 1860s.

The reverse bears the ornate Macullar Portraits. gold-printed publisher's imprint at 445 Washington Street, Boston, along with a penciled inscription reading Hawthorne. This card is a publisher's issue rather than a direct studio portrait, distributed commercially from an existing negative.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was one of the great novelists of the American Renaissance, author of The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860). His fiction's sustained engagement with Puritan guilt, moral ambiguity, and the psychological consequences of sin defined a distinctly American literary sensibility and profoundly influenced writers from Herman Melville, who dedicated Moby-Dick to him, to Henry James. He served as U.S. Consul in Liverpool from 1853 to 1857 and died in 1864 during a journey through New Hampshire with his friend Franklin Pierce.