Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer whose work centers on New England and its Puritan past. He is best known for The Scarlet Letter, the story of a woman in 17th-century Boston who is publicly shamed for bearing a child outside marriage, along with The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. His fiction often turns on moral questions and the sin and psychological complexity of its characters. He died in 1864, having also written a biography of his college friend Franklin Pierce.