Penguin Classics, The House of the Seven Gables BY Hawthorne, Stern

This enduring novel of crime and retribution vividly reflects the social and moral values of New England in the 1840s.

Nathaniel Hawthornes gripping psychological drama concerns the Pyncheon family, a dynasty founded on pious theft, who live for generations under a dead mans curse until their house is finally exorcised by love. Hawthorne, by birth and education, was instilled with the Puritan belief in Americas 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 proprietys faade and exposed the true human condition.