The Scarlet Letter: Introduction by Alfred Kazin [Hardcover]

Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter Pearl is the product of an illicit affair but no one knows the identity of Pearl’s father. Hester’s refusal to name him brings more condemnation upon her. But she stands strong in the face of public scorn, even when she is forced to wear the sign of her shame sewn onto her clothes: the scarlet letter “A” for “Adulteress.”

The story of Hester Prynne–found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community, and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin and her vengeance-seeking husband–possesses a reality heightened by Hawthorne’s pure human sympathy and his unmixed devotion to his supposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine.

In its moral force and the beauty of its conciliations,The Scarlet Letterrightly deserves its stature as the first great novel written by an American, the novel that announced an American literature equal to any in the world.

“[The Scarlet Letter’s] Hester was the creation of someone who loved Woman, saw her, as Verdi did, as necessarily tragic and alone, but emotionally sacred in a diminished world . . . Hester is the only character in the book big enough to sustain a conflict–with the harsh Puritan world–equal to Hawthorne’s own. In a book without heroes, Hester is a unique literary heroine.” –from the Introduction by Alfred KazinNathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and made his ambition to be a writer while still a teenager. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where the poet Longfellow was also a student, and spent several years travelling in New England and writing short stories before his best-known novelThe Scarlet Letterwas published in 1850. His writing was not at first fl“¨