"Cliff Notes - House of Seven Gables" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

the author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," described him
in this manner: "The beauty of his countenance was remarkable.
Crayon portraits and photographs preserve the fine outline of
his head and face but fail to give his vivid coloring and
varying expression. His eyes, fringed with dark lashes, gleamed
like tremulous sapphires."

With The Blithedale Romance in 1852, a novel about his Brook
Farm experiences, a very prolific period in Hawthorne's life
came to an end. He had produced three novels in three years and
was regarded as an important literary figure. When his college
friend Franklin Pierce was elected President of the United
States in 1852, Hawthorne was rewarded with an appointment as
U.S. consul in Liverpool, England. It enabled him to travel on
the European continent and to fill his notebooks with material
for future short stories and novels. But he had written himself
out, it seemed, because none of his later stories came up to the
level of his earlier classics such as "The Great Stone Face,"
"Rappacini's Daughter," and "Young Goodman Brown." His last
novel, The Marble Faun, written in 1860, lacked the power of his
great books.

Hawthorne died quietly in 1864, just before his sixtieth
birthday. Sophia and their three children survived him.
Hawthorne left us a small treasury of significant and
entertaining works, and an enduring reputation. One of his
critics, Hyatt Waggoner, rightly pointed out that "few 19th
century American writers seem so likely to reward rereading as
Hawthorne."

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THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES: THE PLOT

When the prominent Colonel Pyncheon is found dead during a
housewarming party at his new mansion, the official cause of
death is given as a stroke. The townspeople suspect something
different.

Colonel Pyncheon acquired the land for his new homestead only
after its owner, a poor man named Matthew Maule, was hanged
during the Salem witchhunts in 1692, for allegedly practicing
witchcraft. Until the end, the innocent man suspected Colonel
Pyncheon of encouraging the persecution in order to obtain the
Maule property. With the hangman's noose around his neck, Maule
cursed the Colonel. The townspeople remembered the words of the
wizard: "God will give him blood to drink!"

For some one hundred and sixty years, a long line of
Pyncheons struggle to settle their claim to a vast territory in
Maine and to preserve their dynasty against as long a line of