Rena Korb has a master's degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses various themes in "Young Goodman Brown," including Puritanism, good and evil, and ambiguity, as well as the tale's allegorical structure.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of those rare writers who drew great critical acclaim during his own lifetime. To his contemporaries—Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville—as well as to the next generation of writers, Hawthorne was a genius. Poe said in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales that Hawthorne has "the purest style, the finest taste, the most available scholarship, the most delicate humor, the most touching pathos, the most radiant imagination." Hawthorne's work, consisting of over 50 stories and sketches as well as such classic novels as The Scarlet Letter, continued to draw attention after his death and...