The Scarlet Letter is set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston but begins with a nineteenth-century frame, The Custom-House, in which a narrator claims to discover an embroidered letter A and the story of Hester Prynne. Hester appears on the scaffold with her infant Pearl, condemned to wear the scarlet letter for adultery while refusing to name the child's father.
Author
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Frequently Cited
“Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation”
“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred”