This enduring novel of crime and retribution vividly reflects the social and moral values of New England in the 1840s.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's gripping psychological drama concerns the Pyncheon family, a dynasty founded on pious theft, who live for generations under a dead man's curse until their house is finally exorcised by love.

Hawthorne, by birth and education, was instilled with the Puritan belief in America's limitless promise.

Yet - in part because of blemishes on his own family history - he also saw the darker side of the young nation.

Like his twentieth-century heirs William Faulkner and F.

Scott Fitzgerald, Hawthorne peered behind propriety's façade and exposed the true human condition.