书名：The Scarlet Letter  红字
难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数1230L
作者：Nathaniel Hawthorne
出版社名称：Bantam Classics
出版时间：1981
语种：英文
ISBN：9780007350926
商品尺寸：10.6 x 1.5 x 17.4cm
包装：简装
页数：248

The Scarlet Letter《红字》是美国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”。小说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。
本书是Bantam Classics出版的简装便携英文原版，用轻型环保纸印刷，方便随身携带阅读。

“[Nathaniel Hawthorne] recaptured, for his New England, the essence of Greek tragedy.”—Malcolm Cowley

Hailed by Henry James as “the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter reaches to our nation’s historical and moral roots for the material of great tragedy. Set in an early New England colony, the novel shows the terrible impact a single, passionate act has on the lives of three members of the community: the defiant Hester Prynne; the fiery, tortured Reverend Dimmesdale; and the obsessed, vengeful Chillingworth.
With The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne became the first American novelist to forge from our Puritan heritage a universal classic, a masterful exploration of humanity’s unending struggle with sin, guilt and pride.

The Scarlet Letter《红字》中讲述的是发生在北美殖民时期的恋爱悲剧。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。

纳撒尼尔·霍桑（Nathaniel Hawthorne，1804~1864），美国19世纪影响很大的浪漫主义小说家，美国心理分析小说的开创者。其小说在思想内容和艺术手法上都独具一格，他力图借助想象去挖掘历史素材，以表面温和而实质犀利的笔锋暴露黑暗、讽刺邪恶、揭示真理。爱伦·坡称他的小说“属于艺术的高层次，一种唯有高级别的天才方能驾驭的艺术”。 霍桑的代表作包括长篇小说《红字》《七角楼房》，短篇小说集《重讲一遍的故事》《古宅青苔》《雪影》等。其中《红字》已成为世界文学经典，亨利·詹姆斯、爱伦·坡、赫尔曼·麦尔维尔等文学大师都深受其影响。
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.

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

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.