Introduced by Bob Dylan for Bowtag & Moll, his imprint with Simon & Schuster, The Scarlet Letter is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s enduring novel of shame, secrecy, and defiance: the story of Hester Prynne, a woman branded by her society and made immortal by her refusal to submit.

Hester Prynne is one of American literature’s first defiant women: shamed by her Puritan community, she refuses to name the father of her child and endures a punishment that becomes, as Bob Dylan writes, “a symbol of spiritual and mental enslavement.”

But the secret is not Hester’s alone. As she bears the full force of public judgment, the men around her are consumed by guilt, cowardice, and the fear of exposure. Hawthorne’s masterpiece asks a question that remains bracingly contemporary: what happens when a society is more invested in punishment than truth?

Chosen and introduced by Bob Dylan for Bowtag & Moll, this reissue celebrates The Scarlet Letter as an enduring novel of female defiance and moral hypocrisy.