The Scarlet Letter

In Puritan Boston in the 1640s, Hester Prynne stands on the scaffold before the crowd with her baby, Pearl, in her arms and a scarlet letter A, for adultery, embroidered on her dress. She refuses to name the child's father. Her husband, long thought lost at sea, arrives in disguise and settles in the town as a doctor, Roger Chillingworth, determined to discover her lover, and he fastens on the young, admired minister Arthur Dimmesdale, who is wasting away under his secret guilt. Over the years, Hester's quiet strength and charity change what the letter means.

Nathaniel Hawthorne published the novel in 1850, with an introduction about his own job at the Salem Custom House, where he claims to have found the letter. One of his ancestors was a judge at the Salem witch trials, and his dark view of Puritan hypocrisy is partly a family reckoning. His next novel, about an inherited curse, is The House of the Seven Gables.