House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne - Oxford ed.)

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

ISBN: 9780199539123

Binding: paperback

Section: Fiction

In the final years of the seventeenth century in a small New England town, the venerable Colonel Pyncheon decides to erect a ponderously oak-framed and spacious family mansion. It occupies the spot where Matthew Maule, `an obscure man', had lived in a log hut, until his execution for witchcraft. From the scaffold, Maule pointed his finger at the presiding Colonel and cried `God will give him blood to drink!' The fate of Colonel Pyncheon will prove to bear heavily on his descendants in the crumbling mansion for decades to come.