The Scarlet Letter

By Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Book Id: WPLBN0000213186
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 1.34 MB
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	The Scarlet Letter
Author:	Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Literature, Literature & thought, Writing.
Collections:	Classic Literature Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	World Ebook Library


Citation APA MLA Chicago Hawthorne, B. N. (n.d.). The Scarlet Letter. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.cc/

Excerpt
EDITOR'S NOTE: Nathaniel Hawthorne was already a man of forty-six, and a tale writer of some twenty-four years' standing, when The Scarlet Letter appeared. He was born at Salem, Mass., on July 4th, 1804, son of a sea-captain. He led there a shy and rather sombre life; of few artistic encouragements, yet not wholly uncongenial, his moody, intensely meditative temperament being considered. Its colours and shadows are marvelously reflected in his Twice-Told Tales and other short stories, the product of his first literary period. Even his college days at Bowdoin did not quite break through his acquired and inherited reserve; but beneath it all, his faculty of divining men and women was exercised with almost uncanny prescience and subtlety. The Scarlet Letter, which explains as much of this unique imaginative art, as is to be gathered from reading his highest single achievement, yet needs to be ranged with his other writings, early and late, to have its last effect. In the year that saw it published, he began The House of the Seven Gables, a later romance or prose-tragedy of the Puritan-American community as he had himself known it - defrauded of art and the joy of life, starving for symbols as Emerson has it. Nathaniel Hawthorne died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, on May 18th, 1864.

Table of Contents
· EDITOR'S NOTE · THE CUSTOM-HOUSE · THE SCARLET LETTER · I. THE PRISON DOOR · II. THE MARKET-PLACE · III. THE RECOGNITION · IV. THE INTERVIEW · V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE · VI. PEARL · VII. THE GOVERNOR'S HALL · VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER · IX. THE LEECH · X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT · XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART · XII. THE MINISTER'S VIGIL · XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER · XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN · XV. HESTER AND PEARL · XVI. A FOREST WALK · XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER · XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE · XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE