We do not know who the greatest American novelist is. Perhaps it is Mark Twain, or Henry James, or William Faulkner, or Dan Brown. We know only that other nations may bring forward a Cervantes, a Fielding, a Hugo, a Murasaki, a Dickens, or any other name they might care to flourish before us, and we should only say, "Yes, but we have Hawthorne."
The Scarlet Letter, A Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850. —From archive.org. The first edition in a color scan, revealing that the title was actually printed in scarlet on the title page.
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. London, 1851. —This is an unauthorized English edition printed the year after the first American edition.
The Scarlet Letter. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1876. A good scan of a one-volume edition from the successor to Hawthorne's own publisher.
"No one who has taken up the Scarlet Letter will willingly lay it down till he has finished it; and he will do well not to pause. For he cannot resume the story where he left it. He should give himself up to the magic power of the style, without stopping to open wide the eyes of his good sense and judgment, and shake off the spell; or half the weird beauty will disappear like a 'dissolving view.' To be sure, when he closes the book, he will feel very much like the giddy and bewildered patient who is just awaking from his first experiment of the effects of sulphuric ether. The soul has been floating or flying between earth and heaven, with dim ideas of pain and pleasure strangely mingled, and all things earthly swimming dizzily and dreamily, yet most beautiful, before the half shut eye....We know of no writer who better understands and combines the elements of the picturesque in writing than Mr. Hawthorne. His style may be compared to a sheet of transparent water, reflecting from its surface blue skies, nodding woods, and the smallest spray or flower that peeps over its grassy margin; while in its clear yet mysterious depths we espy rarer and stranger things, which we must dive for, if we would examine. Whether they might prove gems or pebbles, when taken out of the fluctuating medium through which the sun-beams reach them, is of no consequence to the effect. Every thing charms the eye and ear, and nothing looks like art and pains-taking." ——North American Review, July, 1850.
The House of the Seven Gables. A romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1851.
Another copy.
The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862. —This is not the first edition, but it is a decent scan of a one-volume edition by Hawthorne's own publisher, issued while Hawthorne was still alive.
The Blithedale Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Authorized edition. Leipzig: Alphons Dürr, 1858.
Transformation: or, the Romance of Monte Beni. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. A new edition. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1861. —This is the English title of The Marble Faun, which Hawthorne had published simultaneously in England and America. The book evidently made a strong impression on English critics: this second edition, a year after the first, carries with it a heavy load of "Opinions of the Press."