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,...

"Boston, 1662. Mary Deerfield is twenty-four-years-old. Her skin is porcelain, her eyes delft blue, and in England she might have had many suitors. But here in the New World, amid this community of saints, Mary is the second wife of Thomas Deerfield, a man as cruel as he is powerful. When Thomas, prone to drunken rage, drives a three-tined fork into the back of Mary's hand, she resolves that she must divorce him to save her life. But in a world where...

With Conan the Cimmerian, Robert E. Howard created more than the greatest action hero of the twentieth century—he also launched a genre that came to be known as sword and sorcery. But Conan wasn’t the first archetypal adventurer to spring from Howard’s fertile imagination.
“He was . . . a strange blending of Puritan and Cavalier, with a touch of the ancient philosopher, and more than a touch of the pagan....

Charles Wentworth, a heartbroken Puritan, comes to the New World from England in 1622 in search of salvation and a new beginning. Burdened with a lifelong struggle between his desire for faith and his doubts about God's love for him, he leaves the only land he has ever known after the death of his fiancée, in hopes of being freed of the temptations that torment him. A new masterpiece from National Book Award and Pen/Faulkner Award finalist Hugh Nissenson,...

Widowed Puritan, Prudence Cotton, needs to find her daughter who was captured by Nipmuc Indians. She receives help from British agent James Bailey who has arrived to investigate the murder of widow Cotton's husband but agrees to help her.

In 18th century Boston, a Puritan girl is condemned to wear the letter "A" for bearing an illegitimate daughter.