The magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a proud stranger in his native land.
He was a young American Indian named Abel, and he lived in two worlds. One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote. The other was the world of the twentieth century, goading him into a compulsive cycle of sexual exploits, dissipation, and disgust. Home from a foreign war, he was a man being torn apart, a man descending into hell.
Editorial Reviews
"Almost unbearably authentic and powerful...unlike any writing I have ever read...Anyone who picks up this novel and reads the first paragraph will be hard pressed to put it down." —Cleveland Plain-Dealer
"A new romanticism, with a reverence for the land, a transcendent optimism, and a sense of mythic wholeness...Push[es] the secular mode of modern fiction into the sacred mode, a faith and recognition in the power of the world." —American Literature
About the Author
N. Scott Momaday was born in 1934 in Lawton, Oklahoma. He is a Kiowa Indian who has lived on several Indian reservations in the Southwest. He has taught at Stanford University, University of Arizona, University of California-Berkeley, and University of California-Santa Barbara. As a poet and scholar, he is known for his studies of Emily Dickinson and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman; House Made of Dawn is his first novel. A novelist, poet, playwright, teacher, painter, and storyteller, his accomplishments in literature, scholarship, and the arts have established him as an enduring American master. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.
![Published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables was conceived by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a modern-day sequel to The Scarlet Letter, which had appeared the year before. Set in Salem, the story's dramatic center revolved around two elederly characters, Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon, as they struggle to free themselves from a centuries-old family curse, ghostly forebears, and a crippling sense of hereditary guilt. They find themselves aided in their quest by their young cousin, Phoebe, and a mysterious daguerreotypist named Holgrave, who has taken up residence with them. Watching over this human drama, as if awaiting its outcome, is the brooding House of the Seven Gables, the Pyncheon ancestral home.
In this book Hawthorne hoped to dispel the gloom of the Puritan past that pervades The Scarlet Letter. Whether or not he succeeded has long been a matter of opinion. Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, praised her husband's new romance for its "dear home-loveliness and satisfaction," while Herman Melville found it a damnably dark and subversive work: "[Hawthorne] says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes."](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/428/805/HouseSevenGables__63675.1659472144.jpg?c=2 "Published in 1851, The House of the Seven Gables was conceived by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a modern-day sequel to The Scarlet Letter, which had appeared the year before. Set in Salem, the story's dramatic center revolved around two elederly characters, Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon, as they struggle to free themselves from a centuries-old family curse, ghostly forebears, and a crippling sense of hereditary guilt. They find themselves aided in their quest by their young cousin, Phoebe, and a mysterious daguerreotypist named Holgrave, who has taken up residence with them. Watching over this human drama, as if awaiting its outcome, is the brooding House of the Seven Gables, the Pyncheon ancestral home.
In this book Hawthorne hoped to dispel the gloom of the Puritan past that pervades The Scarlet Letter. Whether or not he succeeded has long been a matter of opinion. Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, praised her husband's new romance for its \"dear home-loveliness and satisfaction,\" while Herman Melville found it a damnably dark and subversive work: \"[Hawthorne] says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes.\"")
