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I think that to call the Scarlet Letter an autobiography would necessitate a look at all literary fiction, because most authors whom I have heard speak or discuss their work admit that much of their "fiction" contains examples or stories or characters taken from real life experiences. If the Scarlet Letter is an autobiography, then is Uncle Tom's Cabin nonfiction? Because Stowe states at the end that her characters are made up of people she knew in reality, and whose stories and personalities she used in the novel.

Hawthorne may have placed some of his own ideas and beliefs (probably, in fact, since why do writers write, if not for the love of expressing themselves?) into the storyline, and may even have envisioned himself as one or more of the characters as he wrote. But does that really make a novel an autobiography?

Many modern nonfiction writers have undergone investigations to see if their "nonfiction" really did happen. Should we do away with such investigations, then, and just call anything that claims to be nonfiction true, even if none of the literal events in the novel occured?

After having tried my hand at writing both fiction and nonfiction, I have to disagree. In fiction writing, yes, many times characters or plot ideas are drawn from real experiences the author or people the author knows have had. But those plot ideas are fluid, they can be embellished or changed to suit the author's scheme easily. Nonfiction, on the other hand, cannot be altered very much. A few words here or there, no one would grudge (unless you are claiming it to be a video-taped or recorded interview), but entire events cannot be added, new plot-twists cannot be invented out of thin air. To construct a nonfiction plot, one must look at every event in one's life, carefully weed the relevent from the non-relevent ones, and structure them in a way that reads as though it were a novel, though really it is a series of scenes taken from reality and placed into a novel-like context.

So no, I cannot say I would consider the Scarlet Letter autobiographical. It is a brilliant work of fiction, and one of my favorite novels, but it is an altogether different beast than that of the nonfiction book, in my opinion.