In the stern Puritan settlement of seventeenth-century Boston, Hester Prynne is led from prison to a public scaffold, an infant in her arms and a crimson letter "A" sewn upon her breast, the mark of her sin and her shame. Condemned for bearing a child out of wedlock, she steadfastly refuses to name its father, choosing to bear her punishment alone. But watching from the crowd is a stranger newly arrived in town, a man with a buried connection to Hester and a cold determination to uncover the secret she guards. Hawthorne's searing 1850 novel begins a tale of guilt, concealment, and reckoning.