(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)<br><br>The story of Hester Prynne–found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community, and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin and her vengeance-seeking husband–possesses a reality heightened by Hawthorne's pure human sympathy and his unmixed devotion to his supposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine. In its moral force and the beauty of its conciliations, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> rightly deserves its stature as the first great novel written by an American, the novel that announced an American literature equal to any in the world.