Before The Scarlet Letter begins, there is a chapter called “The Custom-House Introductory.” Hawthorne is not the narrator, but the narrator and Hawthorne are very similar. The narrator recounts on how he used to work at The Salem Custom House (where taxes on foreign imports were paid). Hawthorne himself used to work there. The narrator remembers how he was working one day and he found some old papers that were dated back 100 years. It was written by someone named Jonathan Pue, who worked at the customhouse in that time. The story was about a woman named Hester Prynne, who lived 100 years before the time when Pue wrote the papers. After reading these papers, Hawthorne thought that he could make a good novel out of it.