The House of the Seven Gables

Zusatztext "A large and generous production! pervaded with that vague hum! that indefinable echo! of the whole multitudinous life of man! which is the real sign of a great work of fiction." —Henry James Informationen zum Autor Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and made his ambition to be a writer while still a teenager. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where the poet Longfellow was also a student, and spent several years travelling in New England and writing short stories before his best-known novel The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850. His writing was not at first financially rewarding and he worked as measurer and surveyor in the Boston and Salem Custom Houses. In 1853 he was sent to Liverpool as American consul and then lived in Italy before returning to the US in 1860, where he died in his sleep four years later. Klappentext 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.” Chaptetr One The Old Pyncheon Family HALFWAY DOWN a bystreet of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every townborn child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm. On my occasional visits to the town aforesaid, I seldom failed to turn down Pyncheon Street, for the sake of passing through the shadow of these two antiquities–the great elm tree and the weather-beaten edifice. The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive, also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement. But the story would include a chain of events extending over the better part of two centuries, and, written out with reasonable amplitude, would fill a bigger folio volume, or a longer series of duodecimos, than could prudently be appropriated to the annals of all New England during a similar period. It consequently becomes imperative to make short work with most of the traditionary lore of which the old Pyncheon House, otherwise known as the House of the Seven Gables, has been the theme. With a brief sketch, therefore, of the circumstances amid which the foundation of the house was laid, and a rapid glimpse at its quaint exterior, as it grew black in the prevalent east wind–pointing, too, here and there, at some spot of more verdant mossiness on its roof and walls–we shall commence the real action of our tale at an epoch not very remote from the present day. Still, there will be a connection with the long past–a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete–which, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much of o...

Product details

• Authors: Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Publisher: Bantam Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 01.03.1981
• EAN: 9780553212709
• ISBN: 978-0-553-21270-9
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 107 mm x 173 mm x 17 mm
• Series: Bantam Classics; Bantam Classics
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies