Hawthorne's Puritans: From Fact to Fiction.

Argues that Nathaniel Hawthorne's defense of his family in `The House of the Seven Gables' lies in the creation of a monolithic Puritanism, in which all figures of authority acted as his own ancestors acted. How heretics are represented in Hawthorne's fiction; Strategy that resulted in misrepresentation of actual Puritans; Factor that complicates the issue of whether Hawthorne knowingly used the name of an existent New England family in the fiction.