The Scarlet Letter is particularly germane for anyone looking around at contemporary America and wondering how it got to this point. Though the story may be fanciful – Hawthorne called it a “romance” – it is nonetheless based in the reality of its day. Outside of the four central characters, Paulson points out, every named figure in the novel is a real historical personage. “He wanted it to work as a moral tale,” Paulson says. “But he also didn’t want anyone to think that he had made up anything else that was just so weird about the Massachusetts Bay colony.”
– Steven W. Beattie, Quill & Quire Omni, August 29, 2019
I talked with Steven W. Beattie at Quill & Quire about why I’m publishing The Scarlet Letter now, how it relates to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and what’s with the missing ‘A’ (I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s not really missing, it’s just the same colour as the background). You can find the article here [subscriber only] .