Question: Which American novelist and short story writer lived in a house previously inhabited by Louisa May Alcott?
Context: (Abigail) May Alcott Nieriker (July 26, 1840 – December 29, 1879) was an American artist and the youngest sister of Louisa May Alcott.  She was the basis for the character Amy (an anagram of May) in her sister's semi-autobiographical novel "Little Women" (1868).  She was named after her mother, Abigail May, and first called Abba, then Abby, and finally May, which she asked to be called in November 1863 when in her twenties. Anna Bronson Alcott Pratt (March 16, 1831 – July 17, 1893) was the elder sister of American novelist Louisa May Alcott.  She was the basis for the character Margaret "Meg" of "Little Women" (1868), her sister's classic, semi-autobiographical novel.  The eldest of the four Alcott sisters (being herself, Louisa, Lizzie, and May), Anna is remembered as a dutiful, self-sacrificing and loving sister, wife and mother who conformed to the mold of Victorian womanhood more easily than did her sisters.  To her family members, she served as an emotional shelter. John Bridge Pratt (June 16, 1833 – November 27, 1870) was the husband of Anna Bronson Alcott Pratt, the elder sister of novelist Louisa May Alcott.  He inspired the fictional character John Brooke in his sister-in-law Louisa May Alcott's best known novels. Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father is a 2007 biography by John Matteson of Louisa May Alcott, best known as the author of "Little Women", and her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, an American transcendentalist philosopher and the founder of the Fruitlands utopian community.  "Eden's Outcasts" won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Abigail "Abba" Alcott (née May; October 8, 1800 – November 25, 1877) May was an activist for several causes and one of the first paid social workers in the state of Massachusetts.  She was the wife of Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott and mother of four daughters, including Civil War novelist Louisa May Alcott. The Wayside is a historic house in Concord, Massachusetts.  The earliest part of the home may date to 1717.  Later, it successively became the home of the young Louisa May Alcott and her family, author Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family, and children's writer Margaret Sidney.  It became the first site with literary associations acquired by the National Park Service and is now open to the public as part of Minute Man National Historical Park. Nathaniel Hawthorne ( ; born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer. Samuel Joseph May (September 12, 1797 – July 1, 1871) an American reformer during the nineteenth century, championed multiple reform movements including education, women’s rights, and abolitionism.  May argued on behalf of all working people that the rights of humanity were more important than the rights of property and advocated for minimum wages and legal limitations on the amassing of wealth.  He was born on September 12, 1797, in an upper class Boston area.  May was the son of Colonel Joseph May, a merchant, and Dorothy Sewell, who was descended from or connected to many of the leading families of colonial Massachusetts, including the Quincys and the Hancocks.  His sister was Abby May Alcott, mother of novelist Louisa May Alcott.  In 1825, he married Lucretia Flagge Coffin with whom he had five children.  Author Eve LaPlante, who wrote several books about his sister Abby May Alcott and a book about Sewall ancestor, Judge Samuel Sewall is one of his direct descendants. Louisa May Alcott ( ; November 29, 1832March 6, 1888) was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel "Little Women" (1868) and its sequels "Little Men" (1871) and "Jo's Boys" (1886).  Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she also grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Eve LaPlante is a New Englander who has written many articles, essays, and non-fiction books.  Her website is http://www.evelaplante.com.  Married with four children, she writes nonfiction books, one of which, SALEM WITCH JUDGE, won the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction.  LaPlante's ancestor biographies "have been praised as reminiscent of a more celebratory Nathaniel Hawthorne", according to the Boston Book Festival.  In the anthology BOSTON, which includes the preface to LaPlante's AMERICAN JEZEBEL, Shaun O'Connell observed, "Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne dug into the dark history of his ancestry, which reached back both to the original Boston settlement of the 1630s and the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, so too did LaPlante trace family members who were rooted in the same eras... Hawthorne took shame upon himself for the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and LaPlante offers praise for her forebears who testified against Puritan repression.  As her prefaces to these biographies, a kind of spiritual autobiography, show, Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Sewall were not the dark Puritans many imagined them to be.  They remain living presences, even models of rectitude, into the twenty-first century."  LaPlante is a first cousin, four generations removed, of Louisa May Alcott.  She collected and edited the private papers of her great great great great-aunt Abigail May Alcott, the abolitionist and suffragist who was Louisa's mother and mentor.
Answer: Nathaniel Hawthorne