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'He has the purest style, the finest taste, the most available scholarship, the most delicate humor, the most touching pathos, the most radiant imagination, the most consummate ingenuity,' wrote Poe of Hawthorne, whose novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850) is generally regarded as the first great work of American fiction. It is the story of a 'fallen woman' - fallen, that is, in the eyes of the Calvinist-Puritan society of Boston — and of her daughter and the unacknowledged father. Hawthorne fiercely attacks this society for its persecution of those who have broken none of Nature’s laws, yet sympathizes with it enough to be able to regard his 'romance' as 'a tale of human frailty and sorrow'. Of the 'family' he writes with warmth and understanding and on them lavishes the artistic charms that so delighted Henry James. Puritanism, which fascinated Hawthorne, is also the special concern of the other tales in this volume: they have been selected to show how variously he treated the subject. This edition contains THE SCARLET LETTER as well as The Gray Champion, The Maypole of Merry Mount, The Minister’s Black Veil, Young Goodman Brown and The Gentle Boy.