On pessimists

I was looking up some more information about Melville's pessimism and authors like him and I found a quote that I thought was relevant. It talks about why Nathaniel Hawthorne, another pessimist author, sought to create the characters and narratives they did: "In part these three writers (Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville) felt that American life lacked materials for great fiction. Hawthorne bemoaned the difficulty of writing in a country where there is 'no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong'. Psychology not society fascinated these writers. Each probed the depth of the human mind rather than the intricacies of social relationships.Their work displayed an underlying pessimism and about the human condition and the fundamental irrationality of human nature"

While I agree that the human experience would be incomplete without pondering the evils and ills of the world, with such an outlook on life specifically as an artist, life seems more like a curse than a blessing, and for me it would lose all meaning if I solely defined life as suffering, pain, and death.