This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges. However, it is not so much her harsh sentence, but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the way to the book's poignant climax. AUTHOR: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was an American novelist and short-story writer, born in Salem, Massachusetts. His works are based largely on historical events in New England, and 'The Scarlet Letter' remains his most popular work.