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The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (298 pages) The story begins in Salem, Massachusetts with a nameless narrator who was the surveyor in a customhouse. He stumbles across a number of documents in the house’s attic and among these, he discovers a manuscript bundled with a gold-embroidered patch in the shape of an "A." The manuscript was written by a past surveyor who detailed events some two-hundred years before the narrator’s time. He later decides to write a fictional story based on the events from the manuscript and calls it The Scarlet Letter. The narrator then goes into his book which takes place in 17th century Boston which was a Puritan settlement. A young woman is guided out of a prison with a child in her arms and the letter "A" patched against her breast. An elderly onlooker asks of what is going on and a man in the crowd explains that the lady is Hester Prynne who carries the child, Pearl, of an adulterer and is being charged for illicit sexual intercourse. The man explains to the elder that Hester was sent ahead to Boston by her husband, who is a scholar much older than she, but he never arrived afterward. It was said that he was lost at sea. Apparently, while waiting, Hester had an affair with a