A classic of American literature, The Scarlet Letter (1850) was Hawthorne's first major work. It tells the story of Hester Prynne, her lover and her love-child. The misfortunes of Hester, almost literally branded by society as a fallen woman, are related with racking poignancy and supreme imaginative stamina. Hawthorne's condemnation of the Calvinist-Puritan society which persecuted so relentlessly those transgressing its moral code is harsh and explicit and underlies the other, much shorter tales collected in this volume. Yet these, like The Scarlet Letter, also reveal a certain moral ambivalence on the part of Hawthorne which led him to regard his novel both as a 'romance' and as
'a tale of human frailty and sorrow'.