Scarlet Letter, The

Having been found guilty of adultery, Hester Prynne is forced to wear an embroidered scarlet letter A as a punishment for her sin. While her vengeful husband embarks on a quest to discover the identity of her lover, she is left to face the consequences of her infidelity and find a place for herself and her illegitimate child in the hostile environment of seventeenth-century Puritan Boston. Nathaniel Hawthorne's tense narrative astonished readers with its unparalleled psychological depth when it first appeared, and the novel now stands as one of America's literary landmarks.