Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece The Scarlet Letter (1850), centers on Hester Prynne, a young woman who incurs the wrath of her rigidly Puritan community when she becomes pregnant and refuses to name the father.

Reverend Hooper, the main character in the "The Minister's Black Veil" an 1835 short story by Hawthorne, bears much in common with other Hawthorne characters, he is obsessed with sin and guilt and chooses to advertise his knowledge of the human potential for evil. The action unfolds in a seventeenth-century New England parish, when the minister reports to a Sunday morning service wearing a black veil.

"The Tell-Tale Heart," Edgar Allan Poe (1843). Considered one of Poe's greatest tales of psychological horror, this story involves a murderer who buries his victim under the floor of his apartment and is then tortured by the sound of a beating heart.

"The Devil...