As she emerges from the prison of a Puritan New England town, Hester Prynne defies the dark gloom much as the rose blooms against the prison door. With her illegitimate baby, Pearl, clutched in her arms and the letter A -- the mark of an adultress -- embroideredin scarlet thread on her breast, Hester holds her head high as she faces the malice and scorn of the townsfolk. Her powerful, bittersweet story is an American Classic that continues to touch...

Shares the story of the victims, accused witches, corrupt officials, and mass hysteria that turned a mysterious illness affecting two children in Salem Village, Massachusetts, into a witch hunt that took more than a dozen lives and ruined hundreds more.

"The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts: Hester Prynne...

With eloquence equal to Jefferson and Tom Paine, Adams helped ignite the flame of liberty and made sure it glowed even during the Revolution's darkest hours. He was, as Jefferson later observed, "truly the man of the Revolution." Adams played a pivotal role not fully appreciated until now in the events leading up to the confrontation with the British. Believing that God willed a free American nation, he was among the first to call for independence....

After being forced to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Roger Williams travels south and, with the help of the Narragansett Indians, founds Providence, Rhode Island.