The Scarlet Letter
In seventeenth-century Boston a woman is made to wear a letter on her clothing for the rest of her life. Hawthorne sets the story in a community that believes public punishment produces private virtue, and then watches what the punishment actually does to the three people at the centre of it.
The framing chapters about the Custom House are often skipped; they explain why a writer in Salem in the 1840s was so interested in the machinery of public shame. The novel is less a tragedy than a long study of how a symbol escapes its makers.
Public-domain status
First published in 1850. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Nathaniel Hawthorne died in 1864, so this work has been free to republish there since 1935.
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