Nathaniel Hawthorne

EXCEPTIONAL UNABRIDGED EDITION Read one of the greatest masterpieces of all time in a beautiful edition. In the harsh Puritan community of 17th century Boston, Hester Prynne, a young woman married to a much older man, bears an illegitimate child and is sentenced to wear a red A to shame her. She struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity while her lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, is broken by his own sense of guilt, and her husband, Roger Chillingworth, seeks revenge. Publicly disgraced and ostracized, Hester Prynne draws on her inner strength and certainty of spirit to emerge as the first true heroine of American fiction. The Scarlet Letter, first published in 1850, is an outstanding work of gothic romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), an American novelist and short story writer. In 1850, adultery was an extremely risqu subject, but because Hawthorne had the support of the New England literary establishment, it passed easily into the realm of appropriate reading and his masterpiece was an immediate success. This enthralling story remains relevant for its philosophical and psychological depth, and continues to be read as a classic tale on a universal theme: the human conflict between emotion and moral. Referred to as "Great American Novel, this masterpiece of Hawthorne at the height of his literary genius is one of the first mass-produced books in America. Read the other "Great American Novels" in a beautiful book series by the editor Atlantic Editions: The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

The classic American novel, rejacketed with a new foreword by Tom Perotta and introduction by Hawthorne scholar Robert MilderSet in the harsh Puritan community of 17th century Boston, this is a tale of an adulterous entanglement that results in an illegitimate birth. The mother of the child, Hester Prynne, is publicly disgraced and ostracized but emerges as the first true heroine of American fiction.

He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, the only judge involved in the Salem witch trials who never repented of his actions. Nathaniel later added a "w" to make his name "Hawthorne" in order to hide this relation. He entered Bowdoin College in 1821, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1824, 1] and graduated in 1825. Hawthorne published his first work, a novel titled Fanshawe, in 1828; he later tried to suppress it, feeling it was not equal to the standard of his later work. 2] He published several short stories in various periodicals, which he collected in 1837 as Twice-Told Tales. The next year, he became engaged to Sophia Peabody. He worked at a Custom House and joined Brook Farm, a transcendentalist community, before marrying Peabody in 1842. The couple moved to The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, later moving to Salem, the Berkshires, then to The Wayside in Concord. The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, followed by a succession of other novels. A political appointment took Hawthorne and family to Europe before their return to The Wayside in 1860. Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864, and was survived by his wife and their three children.

This is the extended annotated edition including a rare and extensive biographical essay on the author, as well as an introductory to the book written by George Parsons Lathrop. This book, which the author himself preferred to his previous novel, is of quieter tone than "The Scarlet Letter." It is more minutely elaborated, and its pathos depends more on the peculiar temperaments of its characters. The scene is laid in Salem, and the house, which much efiort has been made to identify, corresponds in many points to an old dwelling formerly standing there, known as the Curwen House, and sometimes called "the old witch-house." Engravings from a picture of it are used as illustrations of the book. Some points in the story corresponding to the history of the Hawthornes were noted in the beginning of this sketch. The character of Clifford and the problem of his strange destiny, the mockery of fate, which, having adapted him so delicately to an existence of sensuous refinement, stripped him in his youth, at one brutal stroke, of everything fair in life, and threw him among the lowest and coarsest surroundings, is the great study of the book. Its pervading thought is the theory of inheritance, the repetition of an original type now and then down a family line, and the curse of wrong-doing, blasting innocent lives when wronger and wronged are dust. The characters of Hepzibah and Phoebe are beautiful types, strongly contrasted on the surface, but having at bottom an intimate kinship in moral uprightness and capacity for devotion. That of Judge Pyncheon also is exquisitely worked out in the subtle self-deception of the hypocrite, -no character being so great a favorite in fiction, and none so often badly drawn, as that of the hypocrite, because it looks so much more easy and uncomplicated than it is.