The House of the Seven Gables
This enduring novel of crime and retribution vividly reflects the social and moral values of New England in the 1840s. 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...
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This enduring novel of crime and retribution vividly reflects the social and moral values of New England in the 1840s. 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 façade and exposed the true human condition.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780140390056
Publish date: 1982-01-28
Publisher: Penguin
Pages no: 368
Edition language: English
by Nathaniel Hawthorne Another Classic ticked off my list. This one was written in 1851 and very definitely has the tone of that era of writing. Very verbose and slow moving, with no real interaction between characters. The story is more about the house than the people, though it tells the story...
Somehow I missed this during my omnivorous reading of the 19th century gothic in my undergraduate years. I read it now from the point of view of someone who distinctly resembles fractious, unsightly Hepzibah far more than the idealized "little woman" Phoebe (though perhaps I have always been more a ...
Please note that I gave this book half a star and rounded it to 1 star on Goodreads.Bah. Bah a thousand times. I have no idea why I started reading this. I think for the Halloween Book Bingo and I ended up switching it out. This thing was painful to read. I don't even know what to tell you besides i...
I picked up this book because I was visiting the house the story was based on. Sadly, the tour of the house was a lot more interesting than the story. It started out great, the history behind the house and Colonel Pyncheon's death drew me in, which is why I settled on 3 stars. Hawthorne wrote a good...
This was a real treat after the slog I had with 'Tristram Shandy'. The story was familiar, I'd read a comic serialization of it - in 'Boys' Life'? - somewhere and was always curious how it really went. A looming ancestral house on cursed ground, and a family whose every generation must carry the gui...
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