The House of the Seven Gables -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

F<b>This enduring novel of crime and retribution vividly reflects the social and moral values of New England in the 1840s. <p/></b>Nathaniel Hawthorne's gripping psychological drama concerns the Pyncheon family, a dynasty founded on pious theft, who live for generations under a dead man's curse until their house is finally exorcised by love. Hawthorne, by birth and education, was instilled with the Puritan belief in America's limitless promise. Yet - in part because of blemishes on his own family history - he also saw the darker side of the young nation. Like his twentieth-century heirs William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hawthorne peered behind propriety's fa ade and exposed the true human condition.<br><br><b>Author:</b> Nathaniel Hawthorne<br><b>Publisher:</b> Penguin Group<br><b>Published:</b> 08/27/1981<br><b>Pages:</b> 326<br><b>Binding Type:</b> Paperback<br><b>Weight:</b> 0.65lbs<br><b>Size:</b> 7.70h x 5.00w x 0.90d<br><b>ISBN:</b> 9780140390056<br><b>Age Range:</b> 18-UP<br><p><b>About the Author</b><br>Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, the son and grandson of proud New England seafarers. He lived in genteel poverty with his widowed mother and two young sisters in a house filled with Puritan ideals and family pride in a prosperous past. His boyhood was, in most respects, pleasant and normal. In 1825 he was graduated from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, and he returned to Salem determined to become a writer of short stor