The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne (Paperback)
Product Details
- Barcode
- 9780451531353
- Department
- Books
- Released
- 4 Aug 2009
- Supply Source
- UK
Book
- Binding
- Paperback
- Publisher
- New Amer Library Classics
- Language
- English
- Number of Pages
- 274
- Dimensions
- 171 x 102 x 25mm (136g)
Annotation
Hester Prynne is ostracized from her seventeenth-century Puritan
community for refusing to name the father of her child, the product
of an adulterous relationship.
Summary
A passionate young woman, her cowardly lover, and her aging,
vengeful husband are the central characters in this stark drama of
the conflict between passion and convention in the harsh world of
seventeenth-century Boston.
Tremendously moving and rich in psychological insight, this tragic novel of sin and redemption addresses our Puritan past. Depicting the struggle between mind and heart, Hawthorne fashioned a masterpiece of American fiction.
Tremendously moving and rich in psychological insight, this tragic novel of sin and redemption addresses our Puritan past. Depicting the struggle between mind and heart, Hawthorne fashioned a masterpiece of American fiction.
Fiction
- General Subject
- Literature/Classics
- BISAC Subject 1
- Fiction / Classics
- BISAC Subject 2
- Fiction / Classics
- BIC Classification 1
- Classic fiction (pre c 1945)
- Library Subject 1
- Triangles (Interpersonal relations); Fiction.
- Library Subject 2
- Illegitimate children; Fiction.
- Library Subject 3
- Women immigrants; Fiction.
- Academic Subject 1
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864
- Academic Subject 2
- 19Th Century American Novel And Short Story
- Dewey Classification
- 813/.3
Author Bio
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem,
Massachusetts, the son and grandson of proud New England seafarers.
He lived in genteel poverty with his widowed mother and two young
sisters in a house filled with Puritan ideals and family pride in a
prosperous past. His boyhood was, in most respects, pleasant and
normal. In 1825 he was graduated from Bowdoin College, Brunswick,
Maine, and he returned to Salem determined to become a writer of
short stories. For the next twelve years he was plagued with
unhappiness and self-doubts as he struggled to master his craft. He
finally secured some small measure of success with the publication
of his Twice-Told Tales (1837). His marriage to Sophia Peabody in
1842 was a happy one. The Scarlet Letter (1850), which brought him
immediate recognition, was followed by The House of the Seven
Gables (1851). After serving four years as the American Consul in
Liverpool, England, he traveled in Italy; he returned home to
Massachusetts in 1860. Depressed, weary of writing, and failing in
health, he died on May 19, 1864, at Plymouth, New Hampshire. Brenda
Wineapple was formerly the Washington Irving Professor of Modern
Literary and Historical Studies at Union College and now teaches in
the MFA programs at Columbia University and The New School. Her
books include White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Hawthorne: A Life (winner of the
Ambassador Award of the English-Speaking Union for Best Biography
of 2003), Sister Brother: Gertrude & Leo Stein, and Gen t: A
Biography of Janet Flanner.
Regina Barreca, a professor of English and Feminist Theory at the Unniversity of Connecticut, is the editor of the influential journal LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory. Among her many books are They Used to Call Me Snow White...But I Drifted, a widely acclaimed study of women's humor, and Perfect Husbands (& Other Fairy Tales). She is also the editor of the Penguin Book of Women's Humor.
Regina Barreca, a professor of English and Feminist Theory at the Unniversity of Connecticut, is the editor of the influential journal LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory. Among her many books are They Used to Call Me Snow White...But I Drifted, a widely acclaimed study of women's humor, and Perfect Husbands (& Other Fairy Tales). She is also the editor of the Penguin Book of Women's Humor.
Review Quotes
"[Nathaniel Hawthorne] recaptured, for his New England, the essence
of Greek tragedy." --Malcolm Cowley