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- Published: 15 December 2000
- ISBN: 9780679783381
- Imprint: Random House US Group
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 304
- RRP: $16.99
Categories:
The Scarlet Letter
Formats & editions
Introduction by Kathryn Harrison
Commentary by Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. D. Howells, and Carl Van Doren
A stark tale of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England, The Scarlet Letter is a foundational work of American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s exploration of the dichotomy between the public and private self, internal passion and external convention, gives us the unforgettable Hester Prynne, who discovers strength in the face of ostracism and emerges as a heroine ahead of her time. As Kathryn Harrison points out in her Introduction, Hester is “the herald of the modern heroine.”
Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide
- Published: 15 December 2000
- ISBN: 9780679783381
- Imprint: Random House US Group
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 304
- RRP: $16.99
Categories:
Other books in the series
The New Penguin Book Of American Short Stories, From Washington Irving To Lydia Davis
Edgar Allan Poe And Edith Wharton And Ernest Hemingway And Lydia Davis And Mark Twain And Washington Irving
The Voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin
The Black Tulip
Alexandre Dumas
The Lady of the Camellias
Alexandre Dumas fils
Faust, Part I
Goethe
Faust, Part II
Goethe
Selected Poetry
Goethe Johann Wolfgang Von
The Nibelungenlied
Hatto A T
Volpone and Other Plays
Ben Jonson
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
Georges Perec
Venus in Furs
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Man and Superman
George Bernard Shaw
Military Dispatches
The Duke Of Wellington
Sketches from a Hunter's Album
Ivan Turgenev
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
About the author
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, the son and grandson of proud New England seafarers. He lived in genteel poverty with his widowed mother and two young sisters in a house filled with Puritan ideals and family pride in a prosperous past. His boyhood was, in most respects, pleasant and normal. In 1825 he was graduated from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, and he returned to Salem determined to become a writer of short stories. For the next twelve years he was plagued with unhappiness and self-doubts as he struggled to master his craft. He finally secured some small measure of success with the publication of his Twice-Told Tales (1837). His marriage to Sophia Peabody in 1842 was a happy one. The Scarlet Letter (1850), which brought him immediate recognition, was followed by The House of the Seven Gables (1851). After serving four years as the American Consul in Liverpool, England, he traveled in Italy; he returned home to Massachusetts in 1860. Depressed, weary of writing, and failing in health, he died on May 19, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire.