Lamb in His Bosom
by Caroline Miller
Summary
Cean Carver marries Lonzo Smith and moves to his land in the wiregrass country of south Georgia, a day's journey from her mother, in the decades before the Civil War. That is the whole premise. What follows is her life, told at the pace lives actually run: clearing, planting, spinning, birthing, burying.
The Carvers and their neighbours are poor white farmers who own no one and nothing beyond what their hands produce. The coast, the market and the war, when it finally comes, are all far away and arrive only as rumour and consequence. By the time Cean is forty three she has borne fourteen children, buried five of them and her husband, and come through a venomous snakebite, a panther attack and a house fire.
The texture is the point. Miller wrote it in the idiom of the region, a dialect she collected herself, and the book is dense with the specifics of subsistence: what gets eaten, what gets traded, what a woman in labour is given, what is said over a grave. Childbirth recurs so often because it is the axis the whole world turns on, terror and religion and continuity in one event.
It reads slowly and steadily rather than dramatically, and the archaic voice takes a chapter or two of adjustment.
Around three hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want the pre war South written from the bottom up, with no plantation in sight, and who will take a novel where survival itself is the plot.
Historical Context & Significance
Lamb in His Bosom won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1934 and France's Prix Femina Americain the following year, and it was an immediate bestseller. Caroline Miller was the first Georgian to win the Pulitzer for a novel, three years before Margaret Mitchell.
She was about as far outside the literary world as a winner can be: a minister's daughter from Waycross who lost both parents young, married her high school English teacher, and wrote in Baxley while raising three sons, driving the back roads of south Georgia and filling a notebook with the folktales and expressions of the wiregrass families she met. Critics praised exactly that fieldwork, the faithful rendering of a dialect and culture almost nobody had put in a novel.
Her second book, Lebanon, did not appear until 1944 and was received politely, and she published nothing after it, withdrawing to North Carolina long before her death in 1992. The novel came back into print and found new readers after she died, which is the quiet shape of many careers on this list.