The House of the Seven Gables

In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weatherbeaten, manygabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuriesold curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family of Salem. The greed and haughty pride of the Pyncheon family through the generations is mirrored in the gloomy decay of their sevengabled mansion, where the family's enfeebled and impoverished relations now live. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the familys salvationor its downfall. A brilliant intertwining of the popular, the symbolic, and the historical, Hawthornes gothic Romance 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.