The House of the Seven Gables, romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1851. The work, set in mid-19th-century Salem, Mass., is a sombre study in hereditary sin, based on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne’s own family by a woman condemned to death during the infamous Salem witch trials. The greed and arrogance of the novel’s Pyncheon family through the generations are mirrored in the gloomy decay of their seven-gabled mansion, in which the family’s enfeebled and impoverished relations live. At the book’s end the descendant of a family long ago defrauded by the Pyncheons lifts his ancestors’ curse on the mansion and marries a young niece of the family.