The Scarlet Letter

For a writer who made no effort for twenty years to write another novel after the embarrassment he felt over Fanshawe, Hawthorne enjoyed surprising success when he finally returned to the novel form with The Scarlet Letter. Even in this case, however, the book that has become one of the two or three best-known nineteenth-century American novels began life as another short story. “The Custom-House,” the preface Hawthorne added after completing the narrative, still includes several references to the collection in which he intended to include “The Scarlet Letter.”

Published on 16 March 1850, The Scarlet Letter was a bestseller by nineteenth-century standards. The first edition of 2,500 copies sold out quickly, as did a second edition of 2,500 published a month later. (Ticknor and Fields published a third edition of 1,000 copies later in the year.) Hawthorne had been worried because his original intention was a collection of tales like Mosses from an Old Manse, and he feared that The Scarlet Letter was too short to make a book (one reason he added “The Custom-House” preface). He worried especially, as he told Fields, that the book would be too “somber” if comprised of only The Scarlet Letter. “I found it impossible to relieve the shadows of the story with so much light as I would gladly have thrown in.