The Scarlet Letter: A Romance (Everyman's Library)

The Everymans Library 100 Essentials brings together a selection of 100 of the bestselling titles from the most extensive and distinguished collectible library of the worlds greatest works. An enduring hardcover library of classic and contemporary works from literature to history to philosophy, Everymans Library editions feature original introductions, up-to-date bibliographies, and complete chronologies of the authors lives and works.

This set includes one each of the following titles:

The Aeneid by Virgil

The Analects by Confucius

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Arabian Nights by Husain Haddawy

The Audubon Reader by John James Audubon

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler

Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh

The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Carried Away by Alice Munro

The Castle by Franz Kafka

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler

Collected Stories by Roald Dahl

Collected Stories by Franz Kafka

Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham

The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike

The Complete Short Novels by Anton Chekhov

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Dubliners by James Joyce

Essays by George Orwell

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani

The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Histories by Herodotus

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipul

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

The Iliad by Homer

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett

Mr. Sampath–The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

My Ántonia by Willa Cather

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

The Odyssey by Homer

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Drivers Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth

The Republic by Plato

Rights of Man and Common Sense by Thomas Paine

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan

Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripleys Game by Patricia Highsmith

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

The Woman Warrior and China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Ulysses by James Joyce

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

Zenos Conscience by Italo Svevo

Everymans Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everymans Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

The familiar characters of Hawthorne's dark tale of pride and guilt in colonial New England are given new and added immediacy in the 24 wood engravings by master illustrator Barry Moser.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

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 Hawthornes 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, The Scarlet Letter 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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and made his ambition to be a writer while still a teenager. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where the poet Longfellow was also a student, and spent several years travelling in New England and writing short stories before his best-known novel The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850. His writing was not at first financially rewarding and he worked as measurer and surveyor in the Boston and Salem Custom Houses. In 1853 he was sent to Liverpool as American consul and then lived in Italy before returning to the US in 1860, where he died in his sleep four years later.

His interest in Greek mythology led him to suggest to Longfellow in 1838 that they collaborate on a story for children based on the legend of Pandora's Box, but this never materialized. He wrote A Wonder-Book between April and July 1851, adapting six legends most freely from Charles Anton's A Classical Dictionary (1842). He set out deliberately to 'modernize' the stories, freeing them from what he called 'cold moonshine' and using a romantic, readable style that was criticized by adults but proved universally popular with children.