The most famous and significant novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of the great American fiction authors of the 19th century, novelist and short-story writer. His work was based on the history of his Puritan ancestors and the New England of his own day but, in its “power of blackness”, has universal significance. The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, brought him world renown and made him a classic of American literature. This work, set in seventeenth-century Boston, follows the life of Hester Prynne, a young woman who had an affair with the Puritan minister Arthur Dimmesdale and gave birth to their illegitimate daughter. For her love she became outcast, sentenced to wear a scarlet letter “A” - for adultery - on her clothes for the rest of her life. This masterpiece of literature is a story of the weak, carrying her “disgrace” with dignity, of her boundless strength of mind.