Complete and unabridged, with 57 full-page plates by George Inness, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole. A house built on stolen ground, cursed by the man hanged for witchcraft to make the theft legal, and inhabited two centuries later by an impoverished spinster who must open a cent-shop in the front room. Hawthorne descended from a judge at the Salem trials and wrote this within a year of The Scarlet Letter, in the one happy stretch of his life. The curse works slowly, through property law. Fifty-seven plates, from Bierstadt's Yosemite to Aert van der Neer's moonlit rivers, run alongside the text as a gallery of American light and weather for Hawthorne's Salem.