“He was thinking of the town he had known…”
First published in 1917, Ernest Poole’s His Family offers a delightful yet reflective portrait of one man and his three daughters as they shed the coils of youth and embark on early adulthood. Through sickness and poverty, each of the characters face a unique struggle against the backdrop of the transformative social changes taking place in the early 20th century. In some ways, His Family represents a political shift away from Poole’s earlier syndicalist political convictions, as found in The Harbor, in favor of what literary critic W.J. Stuckey calls a brand of “sentimental socialism.” His Family, the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, has been largely out of print in recent years, not an uncommon story, and while it is not on par with other more high-minded, experimental works of literature as found among later Pulitzer Prize winners, I suspect readers today will still find something to glean from this little known glimpse into an earlier time.
His Family tells the story of a kindly curmudgeon, Roger Gale, who runs a “media clipping” service in New York City. What exactly is a media clipping service you might ask? Apparently, it is a curated business that provides key selections of newspaper headlines relevant to a client’s business needs. Today, the profession has long since disappeared, tossed by the wayside in the age of automation. And much like the company he runs, our protagonist Roger Gale is something of a relic himself. He is a widowed, middle-aged father of three daughters. Roger is not quite sixty years old, and despite being raised in New Hampshire, he lives in a red brick house on the lower west side in a swiftly changing neighborhood. Tragically, years ago he and his wife lost a son, and his wife Judith’s dying wish was that he grow closer with his daughters (“for you will live on in our children’s lives”), and so he has remained in the Big Apple while the city around him has continued to grow and change. In a certain light, His Family might be interpreted as a lengthy reflection on the transformation of New York City, for better or worse, as experienced through the microcosm of Roger Gale. At the start of the novel, for example, he looks on with fear and ire at a looming apartment building under construction in his neighborhood.
Roger’s daughters are: Edith, the eldest (thirty-five years old) who is married to a lawyer named Bruce and they have four children together; Deborah, a school principal for inner-city youth, primarily immigrant children; and Laura, a young woman with a zest for life who suddenly announces a surprise engagement one day to a mysterious man named Hal Sloane. Around the same time that Laura gets married and promptly embarks on a European honeymoon, Edith has a fifth baby. But before leaving on her honeymoon, Laura loudly declares that she will never have any children, a remark which greatly dismays Roger Gale. Meanwhile Deborah has been working frantically for her school and she eventually contracts tuberculosis. To help her recuperate, the family relocates to their family farm in rural New Hampshire. While there, Edith’s anxious husband, Bruce, spends his time racing around the family’s acreage in his newfangled device known as an “automobile.” Upon return to New York, Roger orchestrates a marriage proposal for his daughter, Deborah, to a gentlemanly doctor named Allan Baird.
Before the wedding, Edith’s husband Bruce is suddenly struck by an oncoming car in New York and he tragically dies leaving Edith a widow with five children (anxiety about the advent of the automobile remains a prevalent theme among the early Pulitzer winners). The wedding of Deborah and Allan is then further delayed by the outbreak of World War I, which inflicts financial strain on businesses across the nation, including Roger’s clipping business. Many clients begin canceling their contracts. However, instead of closing the business, Roger makes the fateful decision to take out a second mortgage on his home and he brings Edith’s children into his house to be tutored by Deborah. Suddenly, Laura returns home from Europe, as well. She has fallen in love with a new man –her husband’s business partner. She divorces her husband and then elopes with this new Italian lover, against Roger’s objections. Meanwhile, money troubles grow worse for Roger and he sells his antique collection of rings to keep the roof over their heads. At the same time, Deborah raises large sums of money for her school, over the objections of her sister, Edith, who questions Deborah’s priorities: why focus on other people’s children when one’s own family is struggling? A debate surrounding the issue of women’s suffrage emerges and it lingers as an ever-present agitation for Roger throughout the novel, along with other “new” ideas concerning socialism, progress, immigration, and technology. In many respects, thematic tensions between the virtues of individualism contra familial obligations pervade throughout the novel.
A nearby ringing belltower periodically tolls throughout the novel, a bit of heavy-handed imagery, as if to remind Roger, “there is still time, but you have not long.” He worries that he has failed to live up to his wife’s dying wish. With this in mind, there is a frustrated meditation on the nature of family in His Family –Poole contrasts Edith’s traditional family and her biological children with Laura and her desire to be a “new woman” without having children. Edith represents tradition, whereas Laura represents modernity as a liberated woman. In the middle sits Deborah (who incidentally becomes Roger’s favorite daughter), her “family” is composed of the many immigrant children she has helped throughout her lifetime. This heartfelt devotion to her “family” appeals to Roger and it leads him to hire a young disabled Irish boy, Johnny, at his clipping business –Johnny serves as a reminder of the son Roger had lost so many years earlier.
In the end, an exhausted Roger retires to his farm in New Hampshire, while Johnny miraculously saves the clipping business in New York by uncovering a new source of clientele. Sadly, the energetic boy dies shortly thereafter of tuberculosis which causes Roger great sorrow and the novel ends as Roger dies peacefully in New Hampshire on his farm while his three daughters all make amends with one another.
His Family is less a dark tragedy like Shakespeare’s King Lear, and more an examination of the American middle class as exemplified in Roger Gale, a man with a sense of world-wearied introspection about his city and his family. The tension between the American value of rugged individualism on the one hand, and social concern for the poor on the other, is contrasted within lives of Gale’s three daughters as they grow and change, much like the rapidly industrializing city around them. Throughout the novel, Roger wonders if all these changes are happening for the betterment of our world. Perhaps, in some ways, we, too, can meditate on this question. Like Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, each of Roger’s three daughters represents a different character archetype –a mother (as in Edith or Alyosha), an activist (as in Deborah or Ivan), and a free spirit (Laura or Dmitri), and as such, they approach issues –like individualism, socialism, and family ties– in radically different ways. Each daughter opens up a new part of Roger’s character which allows us to experience his greatest joys, as well as his deepest sorrows.
In a 1917 review of Ernest Poole’s His Family published in The North American Review, Lawrence Gilman summarized the novel as follows: “This book is chiefly to be prized as a picture of Mr. Poole’s own soul?a picture that one likes to remember for heartenment and reassurance. It rewards the best that one can bring to it. Contrived with singular and unimpeachable sincerity, it is written out of a fullness of compassionate in sight, with a gentleness of the heart that gravely puts away all sentimental lures. It has spiritual penetration and latitude and elevation. It is filled throughout with a deep and intimate consciousness of the reality of other souls.”
Notable Quotations:
“He was thinking of a young New York, the mighty throbbing city to which he had come long ago as a lad from the New Hampshire mountains. A place of turbulent thoroughfares, of shouting drivers, hurrying crowds, the crack of whips and the clatter of wheels; an uproarious, thrilling town of enterprise, adventure, youth; a city of pulsing energies, the center of a boundless land; a port of commerce with all the world, of stately ships with snowy sails; a fascinating pleasure town, with throngs of eager travellers hurrying from the ferry boats and rolling off in hansom cabs to the huge hotels on Madison Square. A city where American faces were still to be seen upon all its streets, a cleaner and a kindlier town, with more courtesy in its life, less of the vulgar scramble. A city of houses, separate homes, of quiet streets with rustling trees, with people on the doorsteps upon warm summer evenings and groups of youngsters singing as they came trooping by in the dark. A place of music and romance. At the old opera house downtown, on those dazzling evenings when as a boy he had ushered there for the sake of hearing the music, how the rich joy of being alive, of being young, of being loved, had shone out of women’s eyes. Shimmering satins, dainty gloves and little jewelled slippers, shapely arms and shoulders, vivacious movements, nods and smiles, swift glances, ripples, bursts of laughter, an exciting hum of voices. Then silence, sudden darkness—and music, and the curtain. The great wide curtain slowly rising….” (Roger Gale reflecting on “young” New York).
“What a queer mysterious business it was, this tie between a man and his child.”
“Crowding and jamming closer, pell mell, at a pace which barely slackened, they sped on, a wild uproarious crew, and swept into the city.”
On the 1918 Pulitzer Prize Decision
A June 4, 1918 announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes in The New York Times stated: “The juries for the awarding of the prizes in letters were selected from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.” According to future Pulitzer Prize Administrator John Hohenberg, the jury members for 1918 were the same returning trio as in the prior year: Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale, Robert Grant (a Boston novelist), and William Morton Payne (former literary editor of the Chicago Daily News).
- William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943) or “Billy Phelps” was a celebrated, long-serving professor of English at Yale University for more than four decades. He wrote over twenty books and even late into his career, he maintained a busy schedule of lecturing and touring, as well as a syndicated column and a radio show. Throughout his tenure at Yale, he taught courses on the classics like Shakespeare and Tennyson, as well as the modern novel with the likes of Sinclair Lewis and Joseph Conrad. He served on the boards of numerous cultural institutions as detailed in his obituary in The New York Times in 1943. He was married but never had any children.
- Robert Grant (1852-1940) was a Boston-based novelist who was also a probate court judge (1893-1923) and an Overseer of Harvard University (1896-1921). He was called out of retirement in his later years by the Governor of Massachusetts to serve on a special Advisory Committee with President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard and President Samuel Wesley Stratton of MIT to review the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti to determine whether the trial had been conducted fairly.
- William Morton Payne (1858-1919) was the literary editor of the Chicago Morning News (1884–1888) and then the Chicago Evening Journal (1888–1892). He also wrote for The Dial, The Forum, The Bookman, Harper’s Weekly, The Atlantic Monthly, Music, The New England Magazine, and The International Monthly. Previously, he was an assistant librarian for the Chicago Public Library, and a high school instructor. Between 1900 and 1904 he lectured on English literature at universities in Wisconsin, Kansas, and Chicago. He died in 1919, the year after he served on the Pulitzer Jury which selected His Family.
In 1918, along with His Family, the Novel Jury also praised Bromley Neighborhood by Alice Brown, a story about two rural families whose lives are transformed by World War I. However, the Jury’s majority decision sided with Ernest Poole’s His Family. Since then, much speculation has been made about whether or not this award was actually intended to honor Ernest Poole’s earlier and far more celebrated novel, The Harbor (1915), a bestseller about a young man who spends time roaming along the harbor in New York City as he becomes aware of the working class struggle in America. Much like an Upton Sinclair novel, Poole’s The Harbor offers an explicitly socialist manifesto, a similar “sentimental socialist” spirit as found in the works of Edward Bellamy and Jack London. According to Pulitzer Prize critic, W.J. Stuckey, despite being Poole’s more successful novel, The Harbor offers a “crude imitation of the social history novels of H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy.” This tradition of awarding a Pulitzer Prize to an author’s lesser work in order to honor a superior novel, has often been the case throughout the history of the prizes (as in the case of both Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner).
Elsewhere across the Pulitzer Prizes in 1918, other winners included an early history of the United States entitled With Americans of Past and Present Days by His Excellency J.J. Jusserand, former French ambassador to the United States; and a biography of Julia Ward Howe (author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and tireless advocate for women’s rights and abolitionism) entitled Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910, written by her children, Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliott with assistance by Florence Howe Hall.
A ceremony for the Pulitzer Prizes was held on June 5, 1918 during Columbia’s Commencement hosted by President of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, whose name looms large over the early Pulitzer Prizes.
Who Is Ernest Poole?
Born in Chicago on January 23, 1880 into a politically progressive middle class family, Ernest Cook Poole (1880-1950) was educated in journalism at Princeton. He developed an early passion for the great Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. After graduating from Princeton in 1902 (where he was unceremoniously voted “most useless man” by his classmates), Poole moved to New York City where he lived for most of the rest of his life. He worked as a writer for local magazines, including Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and a socialist paper entitled The Call. His parents were prominent Chicagoans –his father, Abram Poole, served on the Chicago Board of Trade, while his mother, Mary Howe Poole, was something of a legend in the windy city for her heroism displayed during the Great Chicago Fire.
Eventually, Poole became a socialist, having been inspired by writers like Upton Sinclair and Mark Twain (both of whom he met), as well as progressive leaders like Clarence Darrow. Poole was deeply impacted by the suffering of people around him, particularly those along the East Side where he lived, and he was a sympathetic defender of the Russian Revolution (he wrote about it rather extensively while serving as a war correspondent for Outlook magazine which permitted him the chance to travel to Russia and report on the anti-czarist uprisings and the growth of socialism in Europe). He married and had three children (two sons, William and Nicholas, and a daughter, Mrs. Robert Henry Lanchester). His his first foray into fiction-writing utterly exhausted his spirit and it eventually sent him packing from the city to his family farm in New Hampshire (much like Roger Gale’s farm in His Family). Poole’s most celebrated novel, and consequently his debut novel, The Harbor, was published in 1915. In a February 1915 review of The Harbor, The New York Times praised it as “the best American novel that has appeared in many a long day” yet it was also “a very unusual book.” As Poole’s most financially successful book, The Harbor, was a clear demonstration of his socialist leanings. It offers a coming-of-age contemplative story about a New Yorker who spends his life gazing out over the harbor, pondering large ideas, before ultimately discovering his own inner advocacy of labor unions. Curiously, there is a sense in Poole’s second novel, His Family, that the growth of poverty and tenements in New York City has started to crowd-out its long-time residents like Roger Gale, and the growth of labor is more cause for concern than bearing the mark of progress. In many respects, His Family does not share the same apology for socialism that Poole presents in The Harbor, though it certainly touches upon similar questions. Consequently, many have speculated that Poole’s Pulitzer Prize win in 1918 was actually intended to honor his earlier, more popular novel, The Harbor.
In later years, Poole’s zeal for socialism was tempered by the rise of communism and fascism. He published his autobiography The Bridge in 1940, and continued to write until he died of pneumonia in 1950 in New York City shortly before his 70th birthday. The New York Times obituary fondly remembered Ernest Poole as “a warm and unselfish human being.” His widow, Margaret Winterbotham Poole, died in 1968 at the age of 87. She had been an interior decorator before joining the movement for Women’s Suffrage. From 1917-1918, she was President of the Women’s City Club of New York, and she later became a member of the Cosmopolitan Club and served as a trustee of Bennington College, a private liberal arts school in Vermont.
Film Adaptation:
None.
Further Reading:
- The Harbor (1915)
- Ernest Poole’s earlier novel which many critics regard as his finest work. Writing in The Washington Post in 2012, Dennis Drabelle wrote “When it [The Harbor] came out in 1915, it was a critical and popular success, but the Pulitzer Prize for fiction didn’t exist yet. That became significant three years later, when Poole’s next novel, ‘His Family,’ won the first Pulitzer awarded for fiction. The consensus is that it’s the lesser of the two works, that the Pulitzer committee was really honoring Poole for ‘The Harbor.'” Penguin Classics reissued The Harbor in 2012 and, in doing so, “rescued it from oblivion.”
Publisher’s Note:
Publisher’s note: Grosset & Dunlap is a New York publishing house that was originally founded in 1898 by Alexander Grosset and George T. Dunlap. It was known for publishing children’s books like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series. George T. Dunlap later retired in 1944, and Grosset & Dunlap was then sold to a consortium of Random House; Little, Brown; Harper and Brothers; Scribners; and the Book-of-the-Month Club. It has been varyingly traded and acquired over the years. In 1982, Grosset & Dunlap was sold to G. P. Putnam’s Sons, which then merged with Penguin Group in 1996. In 2013, Penguin merged with Bertelsmann’s Random House, forming Penguin Random House which currently owns Grosset & Dunlap today.
Literary Context in 1917-1918:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1917): jointly awarded to Danish authors Karl Adolph Gjellerup (1857–1919) “for his varied and rich poetry, which is inspired by lofty ideals,” and Henrik Pontoppidan (1857–1943) “for his authentic descriptions of present-day life in Denmark.”
- While on medical leave from the British Army at Great Haywood, J. R. R. Tolkien first began writing The Book of Lost Tales (the first version of what would become The Silmarillion).
- Ernest Hemingway accepted his first job as a reporter for The Kansas City Star.
- 51-year-old W. B. Yeats married 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees at Harrow Road register office in London, with Ezra Pound serving as best man. This was only a couple of months after Yeats’ proposal of marriage to his ex-mistress’s daughter, Iseult Gonne, was rejected.
- Arthur Conan Doyle published one of the final collections of Sherlock Holmes short stories entitled His Last Bow.
- Henry James died in 1916 and his final two unfinished novels were published posthumously in 1917.
- Summer by Edith Wharton was published.
- Lucy Maud Montgomery published the fifth book in the “Anne of Green Gables” series, Anne’s House of Dreams.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs published two pulp classics: A Princess of Mars and The Son of Tarzan.
- According to Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1917 was H.G. Wells’s Mr. Britling Sees It Through, a “masterpiece of the wartime experience in south eastern England.” Ernest Poole’s His Family was ranked the 8th bestseller in 1917 according to Publisher’s Weekly. Poole’s earlier novel, The Harbor, had also previously been ranked the 8th bestseller in 1915.
Did The Right Book Win?
During the early 20th century, all the excitement in the literary world was squarely situated across the pond in Europe. And while 1917 was hardly a banner year for American literature, there were a few other novels the Pulitzer Jury might have considered, including Edith Wharton’s Summer (a New England novel about the awakening of a young woman named Charity Royall), or either of Henry James’s unfinished posthumously published novels (The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past) –though the selection of an expatriate like Henry James as the first Pulitzer Prize-winner would, no doubt, have proved to be controversial for the fledgling awards.
There were several other works published in 1917 by prominent names in the history of the Pulitzer Prizes, such as Sinclair Lewis’s The Job (an early novel focused on women’s rights), Edna Ferber’s second novel Fanny Herself, and Joseph Hergesheimer’s third novel Three Black Pennies (which chronicles the fictional lives of three generations of Pennsylvania ironmasters and was the first novel to be published by Alfred A. Knopf). However, none of these novels are generally regarded as among the best of their author’s works today. I’d say the selection of Ernest Poole’s His Family is an “acceptable” choice in my view, though it is far from superlative.
In W. J. Stuckey’s book The Pulitzer Prize Novels, he rather harshly writes: “Judged even by the standards of commercial fiction, His Family is not much of a novel. It is rather obvious propaganda designed for middle-class readers who wish to sympathize with the poor but who do not wish to see any changes in the economic status quo… The book is such an amateurish performance that there would be little point in discussing its artistic qualities if it might not be supposed by some readers who remember Poole’s reputation as a serious novelist (The Harbor was both a popular and critical success) that his fictional talents are here being undervalued” (29-30).
Poole, Ernest. His Family. New York, Grosset & Dunlap, 1926 (originally published in 1917).