In one of those perfect antitheses that The second, published a year later, seem more natural to literary criti- was Hawthorne's depiction of con-cism than to literary history, Haw- temporary Salem life (with flash- thorne's earliest major novels, The backs into the pasts of his fictional Scarlet Letter and The House of the Pyncheon and Maule families) -a Seven Gables, represent the opposite picture that Hawthorne had hoped to poles of his divided genius. finish with all the minute detail of a
The...