And I felt like "The Scarlet Letter" is a really good story with which to examine that. Hawthorne himself wrote the novel at least partially out of guilt because his own ancestor was involved in ...

In an 1871 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, editor James T. Fields wrote about being Hawthorne’s champion. ... In fact, The Scarlet Letter’s initial print run of 2500 books sold out in 10 days.