Scarlet Letter, The

The, a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. The scene is laid in Boston about the middle of the seventeenth century, and depicts with marvelous intensity the effects of sin and of the punishment of sin upon two wholly different natures. The story made its author, then forty-five years of age, famous. It is unquestionably the most powerful of Hawthorne's works, and as a piece of imaginative prose is unequaled.