The Scarlet Letter

Where I heard about it

• Dissident Teacher — on A Library to Build Great Americans, the Substack writer’s 468-title curriculum (December 2025), in the Ages 13–99+ band under Fiction, Lexile 1420 — the prose is genuinely difficult.
• Founders Classical Academy — on the eleventh-grade reading list at the classical school in Lewisville, Texas, posted by the Classic Learning Test in September 2026. The full eight-year sequence is on Founders Classical Academy Reading List.

About this edition

Set two centuries before it was written. Hester raises 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 question is which of the three adults the community destroys, and which it leaves standing. The long opening sketch, “The Custom-House,” is Hawthorne’s own frame for the story. Hawthorne was descended from a Salem magistrate of the witch-trial era. 288 pages in the linked Penguin Classics edition.

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
• Founders Classical Academy Reading List — also assigned in the eleventh-grade year at Founders Classical Academy of Lewisville, a classical school in Texas (Classic Learning Test, 22 September 2026).