The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is publicly shamed for the sin of adultery, forced to wear a scarlet 'A' upon her chest. Hawthorne's novel critiques the hypocrisy and cruelty of religious moral enforcement; it was challenged in early America for its sympathetic portrayal of an adulteress and has been challenged in modern US schools for sexual content.