House of the Seven Gables Unknown - 1975

Name: The House of the Seven Gables
Price: 15.68 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Hawthorne, nathaniel
ISBN: 9780675094719

by Hawthorne, nathaniel

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About this book

First published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables is one of Hawthorne's defining works, a vivid depiction of American life and values, replete with brilliantly etched characters. The tale of a cursed house with a "mysterious and terrible past" and the generations linked to it, Hawthorne's chronicle of the Maule and Pyncheon families over two centuries reveals, in Mary Oliver's words, "lives caught in the common fire of history."

In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family's salvation--or its downfall. Hawthorne called The House of the Seven Gables "a Romance," and freely bestowed upon it many fascinating gothic touches. A brilliant intertwining of the popular, the symbolic, and the historical, the novel is a powerful exploration of personal and national guilt, a work that Henry James declared "the closest approach we are likely to have to the Great American Novel.".

First Edition Identification

Ticknor, Reeds and Fields published a First Printing, First Edition in London, 1851. The hardcover is bound in brown cloth with gold lettering present on the spine

Heritage press published a First Edition in Norwalk, Connecticut, 1963.