Skip to content

The House of the Seven Gables
Stock Photo: Cover May Be Different

The House of the Seven Gables Paperback - 2009

by Nathaniel Hawthorne


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.".

From the publisher

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables" is a classic of American literature, written by one of America's greatest writers. First published in 1851, the book is set in a mansion not unlike his cousin's many-gabled home in Salem, Massachusetts, which Hawthorne visited regularly. Hawthorne believed "the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones" and Hawthorne's story depicts the memorable lives of the residents of the house who were inextricably bound to the sins of their ancestors. Today, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion is popularly known as the House of the Seven Gables, is on The National Register of Historic Places, and is a museum open to the public.

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.

Details

  • Title The House of the Seven Gables
  • Author Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Binding Paperback
  • Pages 450
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher BCR (Bibliographical Center for Research)
  • Date 2009-10
  • ISBN 9781116118636 / 1116118637
  • Weight 0.97 lbs (0.44 kg)
  • Dimensions 7.99 x 5 x 0.91 in (20.29 x 12.70 x 2.31 cm)
  • Reading level 1320
  • Dewey Decimal Code FIC