First published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables is one of Hawthorne's defining works, a vivid depiction of American life and values, replete with brilliantly etched characters. The tale of a cursed house with a "mysterious and terrible past" and the generations linked to it, Hawthorne's chronicle of the Maule and Pyncheon families over two centuries reveals, in Mary Oliver's words, "lives caught in the common fire of history."