The story of Hester Prynne, found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community, and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin and her vengeance-seeking husband, possesses, word by word and page by page, a reality heightened by Hawthorne's pure human sympathy and his unmixed devotion to his supposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine. In its moral force and the beauty of its conciliations, The Scarlet Letter rightly deserves its stature as the first great novel written by an American, the novel that announced an American literature equal to any in the world.
