The Scarlet Letter (The World's Best Reading)

Plot

When it was first published in 1850, The Scarlet Letter was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. It was, the novelist Henry James wrote in 1879, 'the finest piece ofimaginative writing yet put forth in the country ... and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England." What The Scarlet Letter came out of, first of all, was the New England past.