On this day in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was published. Hawthorne's claim of having discovered in his Salem Custom-House not only the historical records of adultery but the actual, three and one-quarter inch letter 'A' -- "a certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded" -- was a literary device, but it was not pure fiction. Among his seventeenth-century ancestors were two sisters who had been forced to sit in the Salem meetinghouse wearing forehead bands identifying their incestuous conduct (while their brother hid out in Maine). The Scarlet Letter also came from Hawthorne's general guilt over the Puritan enthusiasms of some of his other ancestors -- one had been a judge at the witch trials -- and his feeling that his hometown was a place of gloom and convention, itself a punishment: "Methinks all enormous sinners should be sent on pilgrimage to Salem," he wrote in 1840, "and compelled to spend a length of time there ... FULL STORY »
