Is the “Scarlett Letter” the best novel ever written in Boston and North America?

Is the "Scarlett Letter" the best novel ever written in Boston and North America?
Is the “Scarlett Letter” the best novel ever written in Boston and North America?

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (O’Neill Library, PS 1868 .A1) is certainly a classic worthy of reading and re-reading! I hesitate to apply labels like “best” to any art because there isn’t objective criteria for making that definitive a claim, but it’s certainly in a class of literature for which superlatives are regularly used.