The Scarlet Letter

Hawthorne’s novel of 1850, set in Puritan Boston two centuries earlier. Hester Prynne bears a child whose father she will not name, is sentenced to wear a scarlet A on her dress for the rest of her life, and does — raising her daughter at the edge of the town while the man who fathered the child goes on preaching to it and her missing husband circles both of them. The long opening sketch, “The Custom-House,” is Hawthorne’s own frame for the story.

Context: First published 1850. 288 pages in the linked Penguin Classics edition. Lexile 1420, the highest number in this shard — the prose is genuinely difficult. Filed under Fiction. Hawthorne was descended from a Salem magistrate of the witch-trial era, and the novel is his sustained examination of what a community does when it makes a sin public and permanent: which of the three adults it destroys, and which it leaves standing.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; a 468-title reading list published in December 2025 by the Substack writer Dissident Teacher, of which Kyle is carding only the Ages 13-99+ band.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne — the author.
• Christianity — the Puritan theology the novel is set inside and argues with.
• Literature