Nathaniel Hawthorne

Here in one volume are all five of Nathaniel Hawthorne's world-famous novels. "The House of the Seven Gables" moves across 150 years from an ancestral crime condoned by the Puritan theocracy to a new beginning in the bustling and democratic Jacksonian era. Hawthorne's masterpiece, "The Scarlet Letter," is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. "The Blithedale Romance"...

"The canonical American masterpiece of sin, guilt, and revenge, in an authoritative new edition from Penguin Classics with a foreword by Tom Perrotta At once retrospective and radically new, The Scarlet Letter portrays seventeenth-century Puritan New England, a time period irreversibly encoded in the American identity. Hawthorne built one of the most incisive and devastating human dramas ever written out of a community and its outcasts: Hester Prynne...

Fanshawe: Ellen is memorable as the typical damsel in distress. Fanshawe and Edward Walcott are captivating as the rivals for Ellen's love who put their differences aside to save her. The Angler is captivating as a villain who offers some interesting passages and is not quite a monster. And Hawthorne manages to speed things up with a wild chase and bitter confrontation. The scarlet letter: In the early days of Puritan Boston Hester Prynne braves...

Tales told at the fireside and in the woods, adapting such classical myths as Pandora's Box, Baucis and Philemon, and Perseus and Medusa to the storyteller's gothic or romantic environment.

A king who wishes for the golden touch is faced with its unfortunate consequences.