TLDR The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

In Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is jailed for adultery after giving birth to a daughter, Pearl. She stands on the scaffold, refuses to name the father, and must wear a scarlet A. Her long-lost husband arrives as Roger Chillingworth and sets out to find the man. He zeroes in on the minister Arthur Dimmesdale, who is the father and is wasting away with guilt. Hester urges Dimmesdale to flee with her and Pearl. Instead he gives the Election Day sermon, confesses on the scaffold, and dies there. Chillingworth follows within a year. Hester returns and wears the A again.

• Hawthorne added a letter to his name. The family name was Hathorne. His ancestor John Hathorne was a judge at the Salem witch trials, and Nathaniel added the w to his own surname.
• Hawthorne got fired before writing it. He lost his Salem Custom House job in 1849 after a change in administration. He then wrote the novel, which came out in 1850, and the job loss became part of its opening essay.
• The sky delivers its own letter. In the chapter called The Minister's Vigil, Dimmesdale stands on the scaffold at night and sees a meteor trace a huge red A across the sky. Subtle, it is not.

• “Hester gets burned at the stake.” Nobody burned. Hester stands on the scaffold for three hours, then wears the scarlet A on her dress for life. The punishment is public shame, not fire.
• “Chillingworth is Hester's secret lover.” Hardly her lover. Chillingworth is her husband, an older physician who turns up in Boston under a new name and spends the book poking at Dimmesdale's guilt.
• “Hester names the father right away.” She never cracked. On the scaffold Hester refuses to name Pearl's father, even when Dimmesdale himself urges her to speak. The secret holds for years.

• If they say: “Whose old papers does the narrator claim to find?”
  You say: “Jonathan Pue, a long-dead Surveyor of the Custom House. The narrator says he found Pue's papers and a faded scarlet cloth A upstairs, and that the story is his retelling. It's a frame, not history.”
• If they say: “Dimmesdale never owns up to anything.”
  You say: “I'd push back. After his Election Day sermon he climbs the scaffold, confesses in front of the whole town, and dies there. Late, sure. Never, no.”