The Scarlet Letter

In seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is publicly shamed for bearing a child out of wedlock and condemned to wear a scarlet letter 'A' — for adultery — stitched to her breast for the rest of her life. She refuses to name the child's father, choosing to carry the disgrace alone while she raises her spirited daughter, Pearl, on the margins of a rigid and unforgiving community.

As Hester builds a quiet dignity out of her punishment, the man who fathered Pearl is consumed from within by guilt he dares not confess, and a vengeful figure from Hester's past arrives in the colony intent on uncovering — and tormenting — her secret partner in sin.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 masterpiece is a searching study of sin, guilt, hypocrisy, and moral courage in early America. Dense with symbolism and psychological insight, it remains one of the founding works of American literature and a fixture of the classroom canon.