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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Paperback

Young Adult Fiction

ISBN10: 1718779216
ISBN13: 9781718779211
Publisher: Createspace
Published: May 5 2018
Pages: 122
Weight: 0.66
Height: 0.26 Width: 8.50 Depth: 11.02
Language: English
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, an 1850 novel, is a work of historical fiction written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is considered his masterwork. Set in 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the book, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt. In an extended introduction, Hawthorne describes his employment in the Salem Custom House, and how he purportedly found an old document and a piece of cloth embroidered with the letter A in a pile of old papers. This fictitious document being the germ of the story that Hawthorne writes, as follows. In June 1642, in a Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, a crowd gathers to witness the punishment of Hester Prynne, a young woman who has given birth to a baby of unknown parentage. She is required to wear a scarlet A on her dress when she is in front of the townspeople to shame her. The letter A stands for adulteress, although this is never said explicitly in the novel. Her punishment (because adultery was illegal at the time) is to stand on the scaffold for three hours, exposed to public humiliation, and to wear the scarlet A for the rest of her life. As Hester approaches the scaffold, many of the women in the crowd are angered by her beauty and quiet dignity. When demanded and cajoled to name the father of her child, Hester refuses.

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