The House of the Seven Gables is a Gothic novel written beginning in mid-1850 by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The novel follows a New England family and their ancestral home. In the book, Hawthorne explores themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement and colors the tale with suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft. The setting for the book was inspired by a gabled house in Salem belonging to Hawthorne's cousin Susanna Ingersoll and by ancestors of Hawthorne who had played a part in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

Introduction by Brenda WineappleIn 1845 Ralph Waldo Emerson began a series of lectures and writings in which he limned six figures who embodied the principles and aspirations of a still-young American republic. Emerson offers timeless meditations on the value of individual greatness, reconnecting readers with the everyday virtues of his “Representative Men”: Plato, in whose writings are contained “the culture of nations”; Emanuel Swedenborg, a “rich discoverer” who strove to unite the scientific and spiritual planes; Michel de Montaigne, “the frankest and honestest of all writers”; William Shakespeare, who “wrote the text of modern life”; Napoleon Bonaparte, who had the “virtues and vices” of common men writ large; and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who “in conversation, in calamity…finds new materials.”This Modern Library Paperback Classic reflects the author’s corrections for an 1876 reprinting.

Product Description: A Legacy is the tale of two very different families, the Merzes and the Feldens. The Jewish Merzes are longstanding members of Berlin’s haute bourgeoisie who count a friend of Goethe among their distinguished ancestors. Not that this proud legacy means much of anything to them anymore...read more

Product Description: A new edition of Henry James's classic novel featuring a new afterword.Milly Theale, an American heiress in London, is young, hungry for life, and terminally ill. There she meets the dazzling beauty Kate Croy. Unbeknownst to Milly, Kate is madly in love with an old acquaintance of hers, Merton Densher, a young journalist who has everything a woman could want—except money...read more

Product Description: A New York Times Notable Book of 2013A Kirkus Best Book of 2013A Bookpage Best Book of 2013Dazzling in scope, Ecstatic Nation illuminates one of the most dramatic and momentous chapters in America's past, when the country dreamed big, craved new lands and new freedom, and was bitterly divided over its great moral wrong: slavery...read more

Product Description: Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing features essays, letters, poems, prose, and excerpts of interviews by fifty-seven leading authors of the century. Each had to figure out what it meant to be a writer within the context of the relatively new nation they spoke to, for, and about...read more

Product Description: White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America's most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public.  As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldiers...read more

Product Description: Devoted, eccentric, and compelling, Gertrude and Leo Stein were constant companions, from childhood to adulthood, until, finally, they spoke no more. Americans, expatriates, and virtually orphans, they lived together for almost forty years, collaborating in one of the great artistic and literary adventures of the twentieth century...read more

The author of acclaimed biographies of Janet Flanner and Gertrude and Leo Stein turns her attention to Nathaniel Hawthorne, examining the life and work of the complex literary giant.

The work of the abolitionist poet is featured here, including his passionate denunciation of the Fugitive Slave Law and his fascinating portraits of rural life that combine religion, politics, and rich narration. (view table of contents)

Product Description: The daughter of an Indianapolis mortician, Janet Flanner really began to live at the age of thirty, when she fled to Paris with her female lover. That was in 1921, a few years before she signed on as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, taking the pseudonym Genêt...read more