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- Published: 4 August 2009
- ISBN: 9780451531353
- Imprint: Signet
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 288
- RRP: $12.99
Categories:
The Scarlet Letter
Formats & editions
This tragic novel of sin and redemption is Hawthorne's masterpiece of American fiction.
An ardent young woman, her cowardly lover, and her aging vengeful husband—these are the central characters in this stark drama of the conflict between passion and convention in the harsh world of seventeenth-century Boston. Tremendously moving and rich in psychological insight, this dramatic depiction of the struggle between mind and heart illuminates Hawthorne's concern with our Puritan past and its influence on American life.
With an Introduction by Brenda Wineapple
and an Afterword by Regina Barreca
This edition includes an early Hawthorne story that contains the germ of The Scarlet Letter.
- Published: 4 August 2009
- ISBN: 9780451531353
- Imprint: Signet
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 288
- RRP: $12.99
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.