The Marble Faun
Three young Americans and an Italian count meet in Rome, and a moment of violence changes all of them. Hawthorne sets the novel among studios, catacombs and copies of classical sculpture, and asks what happens when a person without a conscience is asked to acquire one.
It is a strange, uneven book. Hawthorne was working from notebooks and had not been in Rome for years, and the descriptive passages sometimes read like a guidebook. But the central idea, that innocence can be as dangerous as experience, is worked through with more seriousness than his other novels attempt.
Public-domain status
First published in 1860. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Nathaniel Hawthorne died in 1864, so this work has been free to republish there since 1935.
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