“November evenings are quiet and still and dry…”
Published in 1964 at the height of the Civil Rights movement, The Keepers of the House covers seven generations of the Howland family in Alabama (which was partly based on author Shirley Ann Grau’s personal experiences as a child in Montgomery) and it powerfully explores themes of racism, revenge, and familial inheritance. As the title suggests, the central house in the book belongs to the Howland family –it serves as a place of constancy across the generations– and is seated along the drought-shrunken Providence River. It was built by the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Abigail Howland Tolliver, the novel’s primary narrator, who feels the weight of her family’s inheritance as she reflects on the burden of her genealogy and regional history, from Native Americans who once roamed the land, to a distant Cousin named Ezra who died in the Civil War on a nearby ridge, and old William Howland who founded the surrounding area and named the slinking Providence River after his mother. The elder Howland was a veteran of the War of 1812 who moved to Tennessee before migrating to the “Mississippi Territory” (later Alabama) in order to be a farmer. He was later raided and scalped by Indians, leaving behind a wife and six children (the Indians were later lynched as retribution). Since then, every newborn boy in the Howland family has been named William Howland. His son William Carter Howland was killed in the war, maimed and burned to death in a thicket, but within three years his brother’s son, William Legendre Howland, inherited his father-in-law’s cotton fortune and built a prospering slave plantation, selling his product in Mobile. He then passed the estate down to one more William Howland, our narrator’s grandfather. He married Lorena Hale Adams (of whom no surviving photos exist because he burned them all one summer afternoon) –they initially met through his mistress (her cousin) Irish Selma Morressey in Atlanta, and had two children together: a daughter named Abigail, and a son named William. Tragically, Lorena soon caught a fever and died young, and William was soon to follow (as was common in the pre-modern medicine era). William Howland was then sent off to France to fight in World War I, but he nearly died of the “flu epidemic” so he eventually returned home “thin and spindly and shaky” to his only daughter Abigail and never left the county again except for business trips every four or five months to Chattanooga.
“He hadn’t mourned for her, not the way a widower is supposed to. It seemed that a part of him had died with her and in a way it was a mercy that it hadn’t been left behind to grieve.”
William Howland became a widower at the age of thirty and was often gossiped about throughout town (Madison City, Wade County). Indeed, gossip and rumor echoed around the community gives us the image of a stifling culture plagued by excessive nosiness and deeply held prejudice. And despite the desire of various characters to live alone, unbothered by society on a plot of rural land. As Shirley Ann Grau later noted in The New York Post in 1965: “Somewhere in the book I try to say that no person in the rural South is really an individual. He or she is a composite of himself and his past. The Southerner has been bred with so many memories that it’s almost as if memory outreaches life.” As such, Ms. Grau employs the use of folklore and magical realism wherein the ghosts of yesteryear often appear to characters in the novel, as if to commune with them at particular moments and remind them of their earthly bonds. At any rate, many people in the county believe William Howland is a widower desperately in need of a wife, including his badgering sister Ann. However, his long, thin, blond-white haired daughter, Abigail, has never had a gentleman caller and she does not dance, but one day she returns home on the train from school and announces she is suddenly engaged to marry an English teacher at Mary Baldwin, named Gregory Edward Mason from London. It is a surprise to her father.
After Abigail’s two-week long wedding, Will Howland takes a trip along the Providence and stumbles upon the community of New Church where he spots a black woman named Margaret Carmichael. She was a “Freejack” and was abandoned by her mother from a young age before being raised in her grandfather’s house –she has visibly black skin but had a white father:
“His eyes followed the stream to the edge of the baptistry, seeing the lean shapes of the willows, the shiny leaves of the sweet bay trees, the dahoons with their red berries, the titi bushes with their yellow fruit. His eyes circled the pool twice before he saw the woman. She was that earth-colored… She knelt at the side of the creek, just above the baptistry, washing clothes. Her dress was brown, her hair was black as her skin” (74-75).
Here, we are introduced to the nearby town of New Church which dates back to the early 1880s when Andrew Jackson and his army marched north from New Orleans –“a fine rich city with great sailing ships moored in the harbor, and a Pope’s cathedral and priests in long black dresses” (9). Jackson took slaves along the way promising them each freedom, but at the time he had such poor handwriting that he simply signed their documentation with the word “Free” and signed his shortened name to just “Jack” so the new Freemen became known as “Freejacks.” Proud of their station, they separated themselves from other blacks in the South, and built a community at the river triangle called New Church. Here Margaret Carmichael was born.
After their initial meeting, Margaret moved in with William Howland and they stayed together for the next thirty years. Though their initial agreement was for Margaret to be an employee on the Howland farm, soon they secretly fall in love and their interracial relationship becomes something of a quiet scandal in the community. Ultimately, Margaret bears him five children, three of whom survive –two girls and a boy. Robert, the eldest, is tall and freckled with red hair –“In the South, most people could tell that Robert was a Negro. In the North, he would have been white” (143). Next was Nina (who was a few months younger than our narrator, Abigail), and finally Christine “Chrissy” who was the brightest of the three. Notably, Margaret traveled to Cleveland to deliver each of her babies so that their birth certificates would not be branded with the term “Negro” on them (and also doctors in the South did not want their names associated with healthcare for black children). From a young age, Margaret stoically sends young children away from the South at a young age so they won’t feel the “blame of being a negro… so they wouldn’t have the weight of their mother’s black face” and she maintains minimal connection to her children thereafter.
The Keepers of the House takes us through the difficult years of the Great Depression, and World War II (in fact, characters listen to news of the Pearl Harbor attack on the radio). Abigail the elder (daughter of William Howland) has a falling out with her English husband who promptly abandons the family during the outbreak of war abroad, and she is later taken to a sanitarium near Santa Fe where she dies of tuberculosis. Abigail the younger then lives with her cousins, the Bannisters, before her cousin Peter “got religion” and kills himself, so Abigail spends her formative years in her grandfather’s house, learning about her family, getting to know Margaret like a mother:
“Sometimes I feel that my grandfather was my father. Margaret, black Margaret, was my mother. Living in a house like this you got your feeling all mixed up… She was his wife, only she wasn’t. She kept house for him and the law said they couldn’t marry, couldn’t ever. Their children took their mothers last name, so they were Howlands they all had the last name Carmichael” (142-143).
We are treated to various images of Abigail’s life growing up –her love life, her friends, her schooling. She goes away to college and recounts a story about nearly drowning and losing her virginity in a car to a boy whom, she later reflects, will die in Korea –“there’s only night like that –ever—where you’re filled with wonder and excitement for no other reason but the earth is beautiful and mysterious and your body is young and strong” (187). She describes how she was expelled from college in a drunken evening wherein a Catholic couple eloped but the whole group of students involved in the situation was blamed. Somehow, Abigail’s grandfather (being a wealthy, prominent man in the state) is able to pull some strings, makes some calls, and send some money such that Abigail is then welcomed back to school wherein she quickly meets a young man whose family is acquainted with her grandfather, John Tolliver, a law student from the “Tolliver Nation” located in Somerset, the northernmost county of the state with the “darkest, bloodiest past in the state. The “Tolliver Nation” once bred slaves and sold them like stock, and naturally, slave uprisings were common, and it left a stained legacy on the family and the region.
Abigail and John Tolliver quickly fall in love, are engaged, and they celebrate at a big wedding (not unlike her mother before her). In spite of her grandfather’s solemn reservations about John Tolliver, Abigail gets pregnant while her husband embarks on a controversial political career (in lieu of being sent abroad to fight in Korea). In order to successfully launch his political image in the South, John panders to the prevalence of widespread white racism, and so he joins the Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan and he begins building a statewide machine which he hopes is will be “better than the ones the Longs have in Louisiana.” John is billed as the “brightest hope of Southern segregationists” and a staunch supporter of states’ rights, even though he personally claims to love “the Negroes.” He also delivers a nationally panned speech to the Citizens Council in which he echoes popular Southern prejudices of the day about differing brain sizes between black and white people –a speech that receives guffaws around the country. Meanwhile, Abigail has four children (Abigail, Mary Lee, Johnny, Marge) and largely raises them herself while her husband is away from home for lengthy periods of time. Sadly, one day her beloved grandfather William Howland dies while out driving his truck in the midst of the overgrown vegetation on the old family land. Then two of Margaret and William’s children suddenly resurface: Nina marries a black man (which leads Margaret to proclaim Nina is dead) and Crissy shares that she is living in Paris, “the haven of American Negroes.” Margaret then moves back to New Church where she falls into a deep depression and apparently kills herself, drowning herself in the very baptistry where William found her many years before (William Howland publicly left her no money in his will, but privately he provided financial support to her so that nothing would appear in the legal record).
As time passes, Margaret realizes that her husband is little more than a careerist who married into her historic, wealthy family for the sake politics. However, John Tolliver’s political ambitions are soon dashed when Margaret’s adult son, Robert, returns home and causes a controversy –the local newspaper headline reads: “Negro Returns to Visit His Legal White Family…Past of Prominent Citizen Comes to Light. Gubernatorial Candidate Involved.” Irate and blaming his wife for being tainted by her grandfather’s black children, John abandons his family while trouble brews and a Southern mob attacks the Howland farm. A group of men arrive in the night, breaking down the gate, shooting the animals, and burning down the barn. In response, Margaret and a farmhand Oliver sneak out the back door and set fire to the mens’ cars while Margaret defends her family home with several loaded shotguns on her front porch. Needless to say, her husband loses the gubernatorial race (the first democrat to lose such a race in many years) and Margaret divorces him.
The novel ends as Margaret begins exacting revenge on all those who have wronged her –she plans to sabotage all her grandfather’s vast landholdings (the best timber lands, half the grazing land in the area, most of the stock, many buildings in town, and even a hotel) in order to punish the town that did not come to her defense. She boards up the hotel and closes other businesses so that the surrounding community will “shrivel and shrink” since, as she tells the ladies in town, “it wasn’t Will Howland you burned down, it was your own house” (306). And as promised, she tracks down Robert’s phone number in Seattle, and threatens to expose his true black identity, but he hangs up on her and the book ends with Abigail manically laughing and also crying in her husband’s old office.
With a title borrowed from Ecclesiastes 12:3-5, The Keepers of the House presents a multi-generational family saga, which is partly reminiscent of the folkloric epic novels of John Steinbeck and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, however Shirley Ann Grau offers a uniquely concise and deeply humanistic dynastic portrait of the Howland’s and their metaphorical house which has been built-up over many generations, only for it to the cultural poison that has lingered for far too long in the region. The Keepers of the House presents a nuanced, complex portrait of people who have come from a myriad of backgrounds –for example, Margaret is half-white and half-black (she is a “Freejack”) but her children can pass as white in the north. She is tall and is considered black, even though her father was white. However, Margaret has clearly internalized the second-class status of blacks in the South, and she has a certain degree of self-hatred. She goes to great lengths to ensure her children are not tainted by her “Negro” identity by casting them out into the world at a very young age. In The Keepers of the House, people are never quite what we expect them to be, and no one walks in the shoes of a perfectly flawless hero. The book forces us to examine, who is a “keeper of the house?” Is Abigail a “keeper of her house?” Is Margaret a “keeper of the house?” It should be noted that Abigail is our narrator and, as such, the whole narrative is filtered through her occasionally prejudicial perspective. Is she a reliable narrator? This remains very much an open question as she reflects on her own loneliness in old age while recounting her family’s story. Regardless, I found The Keepers of the House to be a powerful and deeply moving novel. While I have attempted to faithfully capture the whole sweeping chronicle above, there are numerous evocative and poetic anecdotes as well as memorable reminiscences peppered throughout the book. It weaves together a beautiful tapestry that is uniquely American. Above all, The Keepers of the House confronts readers with a blistering indictment of racism, uniquely published at a time when interracial marriage was only legal in about half the United States. As Ms. Grau later recalled:
“In those days, there were actually churches where, in the midst of Sunday services, the Klan in full regalia would ride up and march up to the pulpit and leave money, which meant plain and simple the preacher was a member of the Klan… You don’t see anything like that anymore, but I doubt anything’s changed.”
Indeed, Grau faced her own personal rebuke after publishing The Keepers of the House as a burning cross was left on her lawn in Metairie, Louisiana while she was away. However, unthreatened by the incident, Grau later laughed at the idea that these “semi-literate gentlemen” had forgotten to bring a shovel so the flames quickly sputtered out and they left a burn mark on her lawn. “It scorched a few feet of grass and it scared the neighbors,” she told The Associated Press in 2003. “It all had kind of a Groucho Marx ending to it.”
Notable Quotations:
“I have the illusion that I am sitting here, dead. That I am like the granite outcroppings, the bones of the earth, fleshless and eternal” (4).
“As I stand there in the immaculate evening I do not find it strange to be fighting an entire town, a whole county. I am alone, yes, of course I am, but I am not particularly afraid. The house was empty and lonely before –I just did not realize it—it’s no worse now. I know that I shall hurt as much as I have been hurt. I shall destroy as much as I have lost” (4).
“I feel the pressure of generations behind me, pushing me along the recurring cycles of birth and death… They are dead all of them. I am caught and tangled around by their doings. It is as if their lives left a weaving of invisible threads in the air of this house, of this town, of this county. And I stumbled and fell into them” (5-6).
“Lorena waved her hand weakly at invisible people, smiled at them, and kept humming, tunelessly now. Al the rest of his life, William remembered sitting and watching those great grey eyes, watching the light fade from them, gradually, bit by bit, until he was not sure when it had happened exactly, when it was gone. Until it was gone completely –the humming, the movement, and he sat looking into a pair of open dead eyes. Not grey, not any color, only lightless. He closed them himself” (22, Will Howland watching the death of his wife Lorena).
“She was a baby he had held, a baby who had wet his pants and vomited across the front of his shirt. And she wasn’t… His feet felt rooted to the earth. The round hoops of his ribs seemed awkward and stiff like barrel staves. I am forty-eight, he thought, and that is old” (43, as William Howland learns of his daughter’s surprise engagement).
“And her body seemed to expand, to swell, to grow like a balloon. She thought of all the distance between the two parts of her, the white and the black. And it seemed to her that those two halves would pull away and separate and leave her there in the open, popped out like a kernel from its husk” (85).
“Margaret shivered again. She saw it all. The generations of weeping that had been done, the generations of weeping that were to come. She could feel it all, feel the pulse and the heartbeat in the banjo chords and in the gentle light voice that sang across them. ‘Going where those chilly winds don’t blow, oh yes’” (105).
“Sometimes he felt the age of the house, felt the people who had lived in it peer over his shoulder, wondering and watching what he was doing. He felt them now, like mice in the walls, voiceless and rustling. It seemed to him too –tonight especially—that he could hear their breath, all of them, dozens of them, breathing together, deep and steady, thee way they had when they were alive…” (133-134).
“Right then and there the first part of my life ended. And the second began. Sometimes the years passed, the hot dusty country years, I found myself thinking back to the first part, to the smooth green college town. And wondering if it had happened at all” (141, Abigail the younger on moving in with her grandfather).
“In those days I was far more at home outside the house than in it. The house was shivery and strange and there were things going on that I didn’t understand” (163).
“And you remember how warm bourbon tasted, in a paper cup with water dipped out of the lake at your feet. How the nights were so unbearably, hauntingly beautiful that you wanted to cry. How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn’t matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night… I wonder now how I lost it, the mysteriousness, the wonder. It faded steadily until one day it was entirely gone, and night became just dark, and the moon was only something that waxed and waned and heralded a changing in the weather. And rain just washed out graveled roads. The glitter was gone” (181-182).
“Sometimes I wonder if I am not like an island the tide has left, leaving only some sea wrack on the beaches, useless things” (182).
“I had done what most white people around here did –knew a Negro and dealt with him for years, and never found out his name. never got curious about who he was, and what he was called. As if Negroes didn’t need identities…” (233).
“People in little towns seem to live forever, drying up like crickets, chirping all the time…” (237).
On the 1965 Pulitzer Prize Decision
In a book review published in The New York Times, Orville Prescott (a former Pulitzer Prize jury member) wrote: “The sounds and smells and folkways of the Deep South are conjured up and the onerous burden of the South’s heritage of violence and of racial neurosis is dramatized in the lives of a few unhappy people.”
The 1965 Pulitzer fiction jury consisted of two familiar names from decades past:
- Maxwell S. Geismar (1910-1979) was a Columbia University alumnus and teacher at Harvard who became a famous literary critic for a variety of publications including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Herald Tribune, The Nation, The American Scholar, The Saturday Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Compton’s Encyclopedia (he also penned a notoriously belligerent critique of Henry James).
- Lewis S. Gannett (1892-1966) was a popular writer and book critic for the New York Herald Tribune. He wrote a regular column called “Books and Things” from 1930-1956. In his obituary in the New York Times in 1966, it was reported that Gannett had reviewed no less than 8,000 books.
Interestingly enough, both Maxwell Geismar and Lewis Gannett both served as Pulitzer fiction jury members in prior years (Geismar from 1943- 1948, and Gannett between 1943-1944). The Keepers of the House was their first choice for the prize –“With it,” Gannett wrote in the jury report, “she [Shirley Ann Grau] emerges as, since the death of William Faulkner, the major Southern writer –and perhaps the regional qualification is unnecessary. No other novel of the year compares with it in the quality of the writing.” The jury ranked it over Saul Bellow’s Herzog which Gannett called “overwritten and undisciplined… a pretentious bore.” In addition, Geismar wrote “I think it is close to scandalous to have such a mediocre book, aimed plainly at sales rather than at art, considered so highly. Another entry was also dismissed in 1965, Louis Auchincloss’s The Rector of Justin, “the kind of novel to which the Prize has been awarded in the past.”
Elsewhere across the Pulitzer Prizes in 1965, the Pulitzer Board controversially denied the Music jury’s recommendation to grant a special award to Duke Ellington.
Who is Shirley Ann Grau?
Shirley Ann Grau, whose name rhymes with “prow” (1929-2020) was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on July 8, 1929. Her father was Adolph Eugene Grau, a dentist, and her mother, Katherine (Onions) Grau, was a homemaker. Shirley grew up in and around Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, with her mother. She graduated from Newcomb College in 1950 (Phi Beta Kappa), Newcomb College was the women’s coordinate college of Tulane University. Despite experiencing fairly significant sexism in the English Department at Tulane University, a composition teacher by the name of John Husband helped her publish her first short story, “For a Place in the Sun,” in 1948, and this was followed by her first collection of short stories, The Black Prince, a few years later. It received glowing reviews from The New York Times, Herald Tribune and Time Magazine, which compared her to Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, J.D. Salinger, and other prominent American authors. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award.
Throughout her lifetime, Grau’s story collections —like The Black Prince, The Wind Shifting West, Nine Women, and Selected Stories —generally received more favorable reviews than her novels. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post, among other critics, had a fondness for her novel The House on Coliseum Street (1961), about a young woman who has an abortion after an affair with a professor (it was partly based on her own experiences supporting young students through difficult situations at Tulane University). Her husband, James Feibleman, was a philosophy professor at Tulane University and often referred his young male students to Grau for help with their personal problems. While The House on Coliseum Street didn’t face as much scrutiny in its day as some of her other novels, Grau said “I suppose if I’d been a regular churchgoer, there might have been people who took umbrage much more strongly, but since I’m not, I don’t really know… I’m sure it was added to the list of things I had done that I should not have done.”
Grau had four children herself (two boys, two girls), and she often cited her sense of humor as allowing her to juggle the roles of wife, mother, and author. She explains how she managed to handle it all in an anecdote about bringing her book proofs to a pediatrician appointment. “Actually, the pediatrician’s examining table is a perfect place to do galleys, because it’s not too long but it’s long enough and you can lean against it and go through it,” she said.
Her novel The Keepers of the House won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Apparently, she hung the award inconspicuously over the closet in her study, where few people would see it. Regarding the character William Howland, she stated: “I named my character after a real man… forgetting that it’s a common name, so I got a call from one of my many cousins saying, ‘I’ve got four children too and my name is William Howland.’ It turns up every generation, the same names. I don’t know that they were terribly happy, but they were Southern gentlemen. They didn’t object.”
Details about Shirley Ann Grau’s life were revealed in an exclusive interview she gave to Deep South Magazine in October 2013 (Grau was then eighty-six years old). The morning she was informed about her Pulitzer Prize win, she thought it was a practical joke from a friend whose voice she thought she recognized. “I was awfully short-tempered that morning because I’d been up all night with one of my children… So, I said to the voice I mistook, ‘yeah and I’m the Queen of England too,’ and I hung up on him.” The Pulitzer Prize committee member did not give up and called her publisher Alfred A. Knopf. “The news got to me, but that was very embarrassing.”
She spent her summers at Martha’s Vineyard at a home situated near John Updike and Thornton Wilder. She and her husband reportedly collected some 8,000 books. By then, she went by her married name of Feibleman and preferred to be called “Annie.” Feminism and racism both play an important role in her books, as does the longing for home. In both Coliseum Street and Keepers, houses and homes become characters and help to shape the story –Grau herself lived in the same house for over 50 years. Hurricane Katrina uprooted her from New Orleans to Houston but generally speaking “New Orleans is most comfortable… You can live here more pleasantly than any place.” However, she also despised certain aspects of the South –she hated being called “honey” or “dear” “…I think Southern is a dirtier word than just about anything else.”
Despite having lived what she called a mostly bland, uninteresting life, Grau was undoubtedly a outrageously funny person –eccentric and supremely confident in herself. She strikes me as one of the more impressive, quirky, fascinating, and under-appreciated figures in American literary history. “You know, I would like just once to have something really dramatic happen to me with trumpets and whistles and everything else, but it never really does”—her contribution to American literature, especially Louisiana literature through her nine novels and short story collections is remarkable. According to her longtime friend and University of Louisiana-Lafayette Associate Professor of English Dr. Maurice DuQuesnay, a reappraisal of Grau is due. He claimed: “In the Louisiana canon, there are as now three writers established beyond doubt: George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin and Shirley Ann Grau.” However, Grau never really wanted to be known as a “Southern author” or a “Southern lady writer,” as journalists of the ’50s and ’60s sometimes called her. “No novel is really a regional novel,” she said. “A novel has to be set somewhere. . . . I would like once in my life to have something I write taken as fiction, not as Southern sociology” (as quoted in her obituary in The Washington Post).
“Shirley Ann Grau writes of our most sublimated and shameful prejudices, about how miscegenation infiltrates every level of society, and about how racial harmony is a pretense that integration alone is unable to address,” said Alison Graham-Bertolini, professor at North Dakota State University and author of “Vigilante Women in Contemporary American Fiction” (2011) in an interview with Deep South Magazine in 2013. Dr. Graham-Bertolini further said in an email interview with The Washington Post that “Her novels wade fearlessly into the complexities of racism and miscegenation across generations,” Graham-Bertolini said in an email interview, “and bring to life the South’s diversity — people, dialects, customs, food and architecture, along with the searing heat, pungent smells and the unbroken blue sky of Louisiana in midsummer.” Grau died on August 3, 2020 at the age of 91 at a retirement home in Kenner, Louisiana. She was 91 and had suffered from complications of a stroke (her husband died in 1987). In its 2020 obituary, The Washington Post dubbed Ms. Grau as a “quiet force” in Southern Literature. She was survived by her four children: Ms. Katherine F. Miner, Nora F. McAlister, and Ian J. and William L. Feibleman; as well as six grandchildren.
Film Adaptation:
- None
Literary Context in 1964-1965
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1964): awarded to French writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.”
- National Book Award (1965): Herzog by Saul Bellow.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1964 was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre. Also featured on the list was Herzog by Saul Bellow and You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming.
- Federico García Lorca’s play The House of Bernarda Alba, was completed just before his assassination in 1936, and received its first performance in Spain.
- Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was allowed to circulate legally in the United States by the U.S. Supreme Court three decades after its publication in France, overturning a state obscenity trial.
- Ian Fleming, while walking to the Royal St George’s Golf Club near Sandwich, Kent, for lunch with friends, collapsed due to a heart attack. His last recorded words were an apology to the ambulance drivers: “I am sorry to trouble you chaps. I don’t know how you get along so fast with the traffic on the roads these days.” He died the next day.
- Herzog by Saul Bellow was published.
- You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming was published.
- Julian by Gore Vidal was published.
- At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels by H.P. Lovecraft was published.
- A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
In my view, The Keepers of the House is an under-appreciated gem among the Pulitzer Prize-winners. I was surprised at how poignant this beautiful little novel remains to this day. It is filled with elements of magical realism and grippingly detailed portraits, unique oral histories, and a succinct panorama of the era. While I was glad to learn that the jury considered Saul Bellow’s Herzog as a top contender for the Pulitzer Prize, as well (even if they found it ultimately unsatisfying), The Keepers of the House strikes me as a most fitting choice for the Pulitzer Prize in 1965.
Grau, Shirley Ann. The Keepers of the House. Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, New York, NY, 1992 (originally published in 1964).