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 risqué 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