书名：TheScarlet Letter  红字
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1230
作者：Nathaniel Hawthorne
出版社名称：CollinsClassics
出版时间：2016
语种：英文
ISBN：9780007350926
商品尺寸：11.1 x 2 x 17.7 cm
包装：简装
页数：324 （以实物为准）

The Scarlet Letter《红字》讲述了发生在北美殖民时期的恋爱悲剧，是诺贝尔文学奖得主霍桑的扛鼎之作，世界文学的经典作品之一。小说惯用象征手法，人物、情节和语言都颇具主观想象色彩，在描写中又常把人的心理活动和直觉放在首位。它不仅是美国浪漫主义小说的代表作，同时也被称作是美国心理分析小说的开创篇。
推荐理由：
1.美国19世纪浪漫主义经典之作，被海明威列入“提高艺术水平的文学书目”；

2.语文新课标推荐书目，美国中学规定学生必读十部名著之一； 
3.柯林斯经典系列，含历史背景及作者介绍（Life & Times），后附英语词汇注释（Glossary of Classic Literature），生词表采用《柯林斯英语词典》的解释，有助于读者学习理解；
4.轻型环保纸印刷，小巧轻便，方便随身携带阅读。
“Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.” A tale of sin, punishment and atonement,The Scarlet Letter exposes the moral rigidity of a 17th-Century Puritan New England community when faced with the illegitimate child of a young mother. Regarded as the first real heroine of American fiction, it is Hester Prynne’s strength of character that resonates with the reader when her harsh sentence is cast. It is in her refusal to reveal the identity of the father in the face of her accusers that Hawthorne champions his heroine and berates the weakness of Society for attacking the innocent. 
HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.
Features:
·Life & Times—a fascinating insight into the author, their work and the time ofpublication
·Glossary of Classic Literature—useful words and phrases at your fingertips, taken fromCollins English Dictionary 

女主人公海丝特·白兰嫁给了医生奇灵渥斯，他们之间却没有爱情。在孤独中白兰与牧师丁梅斯代尔相恋并生下女儿珠儿。白兰被当众惩罚，戴上标志“通奸”的红色A字示众。然而白兰坚贞不屈，拒不说出孩子的父亲。

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and biographer. His work centres on his New England home and often features moral allegories with Puritan inspiration, with themes revolving around inherent good and evil. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, Dark romanticism. 

Preface To THE SECOND EDITION OF THE SCARLET LETTER
The Custom House
INTRODUCTORY TO THE SCARLET LETTER
Chapter 1 The Prison Door
Chapter 2 The Market Place
Chapter 3 The Recognition
Chapter 4 The Interview
Chapter 5 Hester at Her Needle
Chapter 6 Pearl
Chapter 7 The Governor’s Hall
Chapter 8  The Elf-Child and the Minister
Chapter 9 The Leech
Chapter 10 The Leech and His Patient
Chapter 11  The Interior of a Heart
Chapter 12  The Minister’s Vigil
Chapter 13 Another View of Hester
Chapter 14 Hester and the Physician
Chapter 15  Hester and Pearl
Chapter 16 A Forest Walk
Chapter 17 The Pastor and His Parishioner
Chapter 18 A Flood of Sunshine
Chapter 19 The Child at the Brookside
Chapter 20 The Minister in a Maze
Chapter 21 The New England Holiday
Chapter 22 The Procession
Chapter 23 The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter
Chapter 24 Conclusion

1
The Prison Door
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison house somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rosebush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him. 
This rosebush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it —or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison door —we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.