The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

In colonial New England, a young woman gets knocked up out of wedlock and, when she refuses to name the father, is forced to wear a scarlet letter ‘A’ on her chest for the rest of her days.  Seven years later, the father of her child, the local minister, confesses after being poisoned to death by the woman’s former husband, hiding under a new identity as the town doctor.

I somehow made it through high school without even being assigned Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, one of the first mass-produced books in the United States and considered a classic work of American literature.  Which is probably a good thing, as I can’t imagine I would have gotten through it at the time.  To be honest, I barely made it through now.