Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 December 1884 — What the “Scarlet Letter” Did. [ARTICLE]

What the “Scarlet Letter” Did.

The Scarlet Letter was hawthorn’s first successful, book. It dealt with a subject of universal interest in a way that commanded universal sympathy. His son says: “From the time that it was published Hawthorne became a sort of Mecca of pilgrims with Christian’s burdens upon their backs. Secaet criminals of all kinds came to him for counsel and relief. The letters he received from spiritual invalids would have made a strange collection. Some of them he showed to his wife; but most of them ho withheld qven frdm her, and all of them he destroyed. Had such a pilgrimage occurred before he wrote his great romance one might have thought that he had availed himself therein of the material thus affordecl him. But such practical knowledge of the hidden places of the human heart comes only to those who have proved their right to it by tho only magnet of the materials upon which greatness is based.” j