His Family
by Ernest Poole
Summary
Roger Gale is a widower in his sixties, a New Hampshire Yankee who came to New York as a young man in the Gilded Age and built a modest news clipping agency. Now the city he thought he knew is rebuilding itself around his gaslit house, apartment towers rising on every side, and his promise to his dying wife, to live on in the lives of their children, has to be kept in a world neither of them planned for.
The children are three grown daughters, and Poole builds the book as a triptych. Edith is entirely a mother, raising five children as if the nursery were the whole world. Deborah runs a school for immigrant children on the Lower East Side and is half married to the cause of the city's poor. Laura is young, glittering and out every night, spending money nobody quite has. Roger moves among the three households, called in whenever a marriage, a bank balance or a birth goes wrong, seeing something of himself in each daughter and understanding none of them completely.
The pleasures here are period ones: the crowded tenement scenes through Deborah's work, the automobiles and telephones arriving as novelties, the war in Europe pressing in at the edges. The family drama itself is earnest and slow by modern standards, and the book asks patience.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers working through the Pulitzer list from the start, or curious about how respectable New York understood its own transformation in 1917. Read as history, it delivers; read as a novel, it explains why its author needed rescuing from obscurity.
Historical Context & Significance
His Family won the first Pulitzer Prize for the Novel ever awarded, in 1918, which is the main reason anyone opens it now.
The consensus, then and since, is that the prize was really a delayed salute to The Harbor, Ernest Poole's 1915 bestseller about the Brooklyn waterfront, one of the first American novels to treat unions and socialism sympathetically,. Poole was a Princeton graduate turned reform journalist, a campaigner against child labour, a war correspondent and an active socialist from 1908, and The Harbor is the book on which his reputation actually rests.
Nothing he published afterwards matched either novel, and his career as novelist and activist wound down together through the 1920s as American socialism did. He died in 1950. His Family survives as a footnote with a distinction no other book can take: the list that runs through Wharton, Faulkner and Morrison starts here.