The Scarlet Letter: The Plot The Scarlet Letter is a story written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The story's setting is in the 1850's during the puritan times in Boston, Massachusetts. Roger Chillingworth was one of the main characters along with Hester Prynne and Author Dimmesdale. Roger Chillingworth was a small, thin, and was slightly deformed in appearance with one shoulder being higher than the other. He was described on page fifty-six by Hester Prynne as being "remarkable intelligence in his features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mold the physical to itself, and become manifest