The Scarlet Letter

Description

The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts-Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, one emblazoned with sin and the other distraught with hidden guilt; Pearl, a child born into ostracism; and Roger Chillingworth, driven to vengeance by hatred. Though these characters face a set of specifically troubling circumstances, their words and actions point to moral truths inherent in human affairs, independent of time and place. The text of this edition, approved by the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association, is the result of an exhaustive examination of Hawthorne's manuscript and other historical records. Robert Milder provides an enlightening new scholarly introduction and bibliography. Tom Perrotta, whose novel The Leftovers-now a hit HBO show-was influenced by Hawthorne's work, provides a thoughtful foreword on how he came to appreciate Hawthorne's masterpiece. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, where he wrote the bulk of his masterful tales of American colonial history. His career as a novelist began with The Scarlet Letter (1850) and also includes The house of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun. Tom Perotta is the author of two short story collections and six novels, including Election, Little Children, and The Abstinence Teacher. His most recent novel, The Leftovers, has been adapted for television by HBO. Robert Milder is a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Reimagining Thoreau, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine, and Hawthorne's Habitations: A Literary Life.

"[Nathaniel Hawthorne] recaptured, for his New England, the essence of Greek tragedy." --Malcolm Cowley