Complete and unabridged, with 94 full-page plates by Thomas Cole, John Frederick Kensett and Rembrandt. Hawthorne's two novels of Puritan New England, published a year apart. The Scarlet Letter (1850): Hester Prynne, the letter A on her breast, the minister who will not confess and the husband who will not forgive. The House of the Seven Gables (1851): a Salem house under a curse that began with a hanging, and the last of the family that lives in it. He thought the second the better book; readers have always disagreed. Ninety-four plates of New England painting, from Rembrandt to George Inness, gather scholars, farmers and prisoners into a single portrait of the world these two novels came from.