<p>Hawthorne&rsquo;s greatest romance, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, is often simplistically seen as a timeless tale of desire, sin, and redemption. In his introduction, Michael J. Colacurcio argues that <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> is a serious historical novel. If Hawthorne&rsquo;s fiction rigorously and faithfully subjects Hester and Dimmesdale to the limits of seventeenth-century possibility, it nonetheless looks forward to the better, brighter world of Margaret Fuller and Fanny Fern, of Charles Fourier and John Humphrey Noyes.</p><p>The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> in the <i>Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne</i>.</p>