By the time Hawthorne began composing The Scarlet Letter— at or near the time of his enforced departure from the Salem Custom House in 1849— he was already a very accomplished writer of subtly moralized fiction. But he was not in any sense a “novelist.” True, this once obscure, now well-recognized writer of “twice-told tales” had begun his career with the publication of a novella called Fanshawe (1828); and, close to the moment in question, “Ethan Brand” (1849) may have been originally planned as a much longer work. But in the first case it appears that Hawthorne tried to dissociate himself from a piece of juvenilia almost as soon as it was issued; and the most the fifteen pages of “Ethan Brand” can claim is that they are “A Chapter from an Abortive Romance.” So that, whatever his evolving intentions, the writer of The Scarlet Letter still would have to teach himself how to write what elementary theory calls a “specific continuous fiction”; and indeed the formal interest of this first of Hawthorne's three “American Romances” may well concern the question of how to make a luminous moral tale take 200 pages.

It is easy to imagine that, with the publication of his Mosses from an Old Manse in 1846, Hawthorne felt he had pretty well exhausted his short fiction method— of positing a moral premise, often inherited from history, and then watching it consume both itself and some unhappily credulous host, in a reading time brief enough to satisfy the minimalist demands of Edgar Poe. Clearly a tale like “Rappaccini's Daughter” (1844), the masterpiece of the Mosses, was pressing at the limits, both of length and of manageable allusion. And the sketch that introduces the Mosses concedes that it is “the last collection of this nature” the writer intends ever to publish. It may be a recognizable sort of false modesty for him to say “unless I could do better, I have done enough in this kind,” but the note of completion sounds authentic; and though there is some ambiguity about the exact form in which the elongated tale of Hester and Dimmesdale was first planned to appear, it seems clear enough that the writer of The Scarlet Letter had prepared himself for a literary change of pace.