The Scarlet Letter

Hester Prynne comes out of a Boston jail with an infant and an embroidered letter she must wear for life, and the town waits to learn the father's name. Hawthorne wrote the book in a rush after losing his post at the Salem Custom House, and prefaced it with a sketch of that office and of the man who lost it. The scaffold scenes fall at the beginning, the middle and the end; between them the guilt moves from the woman who is punished to the man who is not. Fifty-eight plates, from Rembrandt to Eastman Johnson, hold the Puritan world of the novel in the candlelit scholar, the pedlar, the prisoner of the state.