Novel
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850
Opening lines
A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Boston, around 1642. A crowd waits in front of the prison for the release of a young woman who came alone from across the ocean, with no news for two years of a husband believed to be at the bottom of the sea. She has had a child. She is made to climb onto the platform of the pillory, the infant in her arms, a scarlet letter embroidered on her breast, and the town's pastors order her to name the father. She refuses. At the edge of the crowd stands a small man with a furrowed face, whom no one knows and whom she recognises.
Context
A Whig victory in 1849 costs the author his post at the Salem custom house, and his mother dies that same summer. He was still thinking of a collection of tales; his publisher, James T. Fields, persuades him to publish the novel alone, preceded by the essay on the custom house that was already written. The book appears in Boston on 16 March 1850; the first printing, two thousand five hundred copies, sells out in ten days, and the preface causes such a stir in Salem that the second edition answers it. The success brings him only about fifteen hundred dollars in fourteen years.
Who it is for
A novel of medium length, preceded by a long preface about the customs house where the author was employed, which joins the story only with the discovery of the letter and can be kept for the end.
Prizes and reception
Translated into French as early as 1853 under the title La Lettre rouge, it is on the syllabus in American high schools and has been adapted for the screen several times.
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