The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne - Paperback USED Signet Classics

The curse of Matthew Maule descends on seven generations of the inhabitants of an old New England house.  Nathaniel Hawthorne's works are imbued with a mixture of the actual and the imaginary, and The House of the Seven Gables in an enduring example.  The puritanical Colonel Pyncheon is the embodiment of Hawthorne's own grandfather, a judge at the Salem witch trials; the gloomy gabled house typifies his own depressing home.  It is this masterful blending of the spiritual and the symbolic that allows Hawthorne's haunted house to stand firm where many a weaker one has fallen.