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The House of the Seven Gables is a novel written in 1851 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The novel begins:

Halfway down a by-street 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 town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.

The Pyncheon family actually existed and were ancestors of American novelist Thomas Pynchon. The House of the Seven Gables, the building that inspired the novel, is still standing in Salem, Massachusetts.

Major Characters

• Hepzibah Pyncheon - Hepzibah is an unmarried older woman, a descendant of the Pyncheon who built the house of the title. She is from a high-society class but destitute. At the beginning of the novel, she has opened a cent-shop in the first floor of the house because of the financial ruin of the family.

• Holgrave - a daguerrotypist who boards at the house.

• Phoebe Pyncheon - a young cousin of Hepzibah's, Phoebe has grown up in the country without airs. She shows up unannounced and intends to visit for several weeks.

• Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon - He is a well-to-do judge and political aspirant who lives on a comfortable estate out of town. He has designs on the house where Hepzibah lives. He so strongly resembles the "original" Colonel Pyncheon, who built the house, that some people mistake portraits of the ancestor for the descendant.

• Clifford Pyncheon - Clifford is Hepzibah's elderly, nearly bed-ridden brother who comes to live in the house.

Main Themes

Hawthorne, always haunted by the sins of his ancestors in the Salem witch trials, examines guilt, retribution, and atonement in this novel. His Pyncheon family carries a great burden — for almost 200 years — as a result of the dishonest, amoral way that the land on which the titular house sits was acquired.

Influence

The novel was an inspiration for horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, who called it "New England's greatest contribution to weird literature" in his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature". Seven Gables likely influenced Lovecraft's stories "The Picture in the House", "The Shunned House" and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Notes

1. S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, p. 107.

External links

• House of the Seven Gables at Project Gutenberg
• House of the Seven Gables, online at Ye Olde Library
• Study Guides
  • BookRags
• Free typeset PDF ebook of The House of Seven Gables, optimized for printing

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