The House of the Seven Gables

F<b>This enduring novel of crime and retribution vividly reflects the social and moral values of New England in the 1840s.&#160;<br><br></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&#231;ade and exposed the true human condition.