Even people who have not read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter know about scarlet letters. In building a novel around the predicament of a Puritan woman, Hester Prynne, who is punished for her crime of adultery by being made to wear a scarlet A on her dress, Hawthorne gave us a convenient way of thinking about crime and punishment and about our power to make sentences fit the nature of crimes. We see many references to scarlet letters in the popular media.

Hawthorne is also popularly associated with Puritanism, and he did set some of his best-known fictions, including The Scarlet Letter, in the seventeenth-century world of Puritan New England. One of his ancestors had been a judge at the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, and Hawthorne said he felt guilty about his ancestor's role in persecuting some of Salem's citizens. Hawthorne did not confine himself to Puritanism, however. He was a master psychologist, and many of his works focus on individuals' efforts to understand complex moral problems and relationships.

Hawthorne had an unusual career in that he wrote nothing but short fiction for twenty years and then, after publishing The Scarlet Letter in 1850, nothing but novels for the last fifteen years of his career. The Scarlet Letter was a modest bestseller, and he tried to capitalize on its success by writing The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun.