The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Cori Samuel · 1850 · 565 min

Hester Prynne walks out of the Boston prison with a baby and a letter, and the novel spends its whole length refusing to tell you she was wrong. Hawthorne's Puritans are not cartoons; they are people who believe what they say, which is worse. The book's real subject is the man who did not walk out with her, and the slow rot of a conscience that will not confess — Dimmesdale is the study, Hester the standard he fails. It is short, it is dark, and it was the first American novel that did not apologise for being American.

The reading includes "The Custom-House", the long autobiographical preface most editions print and most readers skip. Keep it: it is Hawthorne being funny about his day job, and it frames the whole book as a found document. Cori Samuel's solo reading, nine and a half hours.

Chosen reading: LibriVox solo production (version 2), read by Cori Samuel; Internet Archive item scarletletterver2_1501_librivox — 27 files: "The Custom-House" in three parts (scarletletter_00a, 00b, 00c) then the 24 chapters contiguously numbered (scarletletter_01_hawthorne_128kb.mp3 … scarletletter_24_hawthorne_128kb.mp3), 543 MB, 9 h 25 min total, catalogued 2015-01-06.

The novel has 24 chapters and the item has 24 chapter files; the three lettered 00 files are the preface, not duplicates. No gaps; running order correct once sorted. The only other complete reading is the 2007 group version; a single voice suits a book this interior.

Published on the source's record rather than a listen-through (owner decision, 2026-08-26): LibriVox proof-listens every completed project chapter by chapter before release, and the three pilots' full listens turned up nothing their project pages had not already said — so the chapter table and byte check above are the verification, and the first listener who finds a fault in this reading should write to the Den.

Two layers, both clear:

• The book. Published 1850 by Ticknor, Reed & Fields, Boston; Hawthorne died in 1864. The term expired long ago.
• The narration. LibriVox dedicates its recordings to the public domain; the item carries a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 label. Recorded 2015 by Cori Samuel, credited on the project page.