The Scarlet Letter is written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and was first published in 1850. The story is about Hester Prynne who conceives a daughter through an affair and her struggles on how to live her life of repentance and dignity. Hester was forced to wear a letter A in her clothes as a badge of shame for what she did. The main themes of the novel were shaming and social stigmatizing, sin, guilt, and ultimately redemption. The Scarlet Letter is one of the first mass-produced books in America and is considered a masterpiece of American literature and a classic moral study. The book's immediate and lasting success is largely due to the way it addressed the spiritual and moral issues from a uniquely American standpoint and it remains relevant today for its philosophical and psychological depth and continues to be read as a classic tale on a universal theme.
