We discuss Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and everyone’s favorite religious extremists — Puritans! We’re talking adultery, history and the novel, and whether children are evil. (Of course they are. How is this a question?) We also talk about how much Hawthorne hated work and how that makes us love him even more.

On the show, we read the Norton edition edited by Leland S. Person. For more on Hawthorne (and Melville!), colonial history, and American imperial ideology, read Myra Jehlen’s American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent.