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| First edition, 1917 |
The Committee Room continues its
TCR Forgotten Pulitzer Series with
His Family by Ernest Poole, winner of the first Pulitzer Prize in the best novel category. Published in 1917 and given the award in 1918,
His Family tells the story of Roger Gale, an aging widower coping with life and trying to keep his family together in rapidly changing Manhattan of the early twentieth century. A New Hampshire Yankee who moved to New York as a young man in the Gilded Age, Roger -- the owner of a news clipping agency -- now finds his single-family, gaslit home surrounded by massive apartment buildings wired with electricity. Motor cars are replacing horse-drawn wagons. Most importantly, the city teems with Catholic and Jewish immigrants and their children. Roger comes to terms with the idea that these newcomers will soon dominate New York, a new kind of New York, and perhaps a better one.
His Family was originally published by Macmillan. The dust jacket of the first edition, depicting the New York skyline dwarfing smaller older homes, was by E.C. Caswell, a leading illustrator. Larry James Gianakos, writing in
PPrize.com says the
His Family wrapper "may well have been Caswell's masterpiece...a work of great art in and of itself."
