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Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne is 1850, The Scarlet Letter is a work of romantic fiction set in a historical setting. Considered to be Hawthorne's masterpiece, the book is set in 17th century Puritanical Boston. The main character is Hester Prynne who has become pregnant after committing adultery.

Hester Prynne's husband has not yet arrived from Europe, so everyone knows she must have comm... More

Written by Nathaniel Hawthorne is 1850, The Scarlet Letter is a work of romantic fiction set in a historical setting. Considered to be Hawthorne's masterpiece, the book is set in 17th century Puritanical Boston. The main character is Hester Prynne who has become pregnant after committing adultery.

Hester Prynne's husband has not yet arrived from Europe, so everyone knows she must have committed adultery. She is forced to wear a tattered piece of cloth with a large red letter "A" on it so that she cannot hide her shame from the world. Hester Prynne refuses to tell anyone who the father of her daughter, Pearl, actually is. This leads to a large chain of events the weaves the themes of legality, sin and guilt throughout the book.

Hester's experience in Puritan Boston recalls the story of Adam and Eve because, in both cases, sin results in expulsion and suffering. But it also results in knowledge - specifically, in knowledge of what it means to be human. For Hester, the scarlet letter functions as "her passport into regions where other women dared not tread", leading her to "speculate" about her society and herself more "boldly" than anyone else in New England.

Hawthorne originally planned The Scarlet Letter to be a shorter novelette which was part of a collection to be named Old Time Legends. His publisher, James Thomas Fields, convinced him to expand the novelette to a full-length novel.

he Scarlet Letter was also one of the first mass-produced books in America. Into the mid-nineteenth century, bookbinders of home-grown literature typically hand-made their books and sold them in small quantities. The first mechanized printing of The Scarlet Letter, 2,500 volumes, sold out within ten days, and was widely read and discussed to an extent not much experienced in the young country up until that time. Copies of the first edition are often sought by collectors as rare books, and may fetch up to around $6,000 USD.

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