Key Facts

• • Full Title: The Scarlet Letter
  • Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Type of Work: Novel
  • Genre: Romance; Historical fiction
  • Language: English
  • Time and Place of Writing: Salem and Concord, Massachusetts; written in the late 1840s
  • First Publication: 1850
  • Publisher: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields
  • Narrator: The story is told by an unnamed narrator who once worked as a customs officer in Salem, Massachusetts. 
  • Point of View: The novel is written in third-person omniscient. 

• Setting

• Time: Middle of the seventeenth century
• Place: Boston, Massachusetts, a strict Puritan colony in early America

• Protagonist: Hester Prynne.