The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, the work that established his major reputation and that has remained one of the foundational texts of American literature ever since. The novel is set in Puritan Boston in the seventeenth century and centers on Hester Prynne, a young woman who has given birth to a child whose father is not her absent husband and who has been sentenced by the Puritan authorities to wear the scarlet letter A on her clothing as a public marker of her adultery.

The novel’s central characters develop across the page count with the kind of careful psychological depth that distinguished Hawthorne’s writing from much of the other American fiction of his period. Hester herself, who refuses to name the father of her child and who carries the public shame of the scarlet letter while building a quiet life of needlework and small kindnesses around the edges of the Puritan community. Arthur Dimmesdale, the young Puritan minister whose secret guilt as the father of Hester’s child slowly destroys him from within. Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s missing husband who returns to find his wife pregnant by another man and who pursues a long campaign of psychological revenge against the man he eventually identifies. Pearl, Hester’s daughter, whose strange and unsettling presence runs through the novel as both literal child and symbolic embodiment of the situation that produced her.

Hawthorne’s prose throughout the novel works at his most carefully attentive to the moral and psychological material that the central situation produces. The novel asks serious questions about sin, guilt, public shame, private conscience, the limits of human judgment, and the wider relationship between religious community and individual moral life. The Puritan setting gives Hawthorne room to engage with the legacy of his own ancestors, who had been Puritan settlers in Salem and whose moral and religious tradition Hawthorne returned to repeatedly across his fiction.

The Scarlet Letter has been continuously in print since its original publication and has been one of the most studied and most discussed novels in the American literary tradition. The novel has been adapted multiple times for film, television, and theater. The phrase scarlet letter itself has entered the wider English language as a reference to public marking of social transgression. For readers approaching Hawthorne for the first time, The Scarlet Letter is the natural starting point. For students of American literature, the novel is essential.