Overview

His Family is a novel by Ernest Poole published in 1917 about the life of a New York widower and his three daughters in the 1910s. It received the first Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1918. His Family tells the story of a middle-class family in New York City in the 1910s. The family's patriarch, widower Roger Gale, struggles to deal with the way his daughters and grandchildren respond to the changing society. Each of his daughters responds in a distinctively different way to the circumstances of their lives, forcing Roger into attempting to calm the increasingly challenging family disputes that erupt. The story begins in the spring of 1913 with Roger Gale, a New York businessman and a widower, owner of a media monitoring service, reflecting on the changes that have come to New York since his arrival in the city as a young man from a New Hampshire farm somewhere near the time of the Civil War. He is driven by his wife's dying request to remain close to their three daughters, yet he feels very distant from them-this despite the fact that the younger two (Deborah, a school principal, and Laura) live in the family home with him, and Edith, who is married with four children, visits him regularly. The early conflicts within the family largely surround Laura's sudden announcement of her engagement to Hal Sloane, a young businessman who is generally unknown to the family, and Edith's pregnancy, as her fifth child arrives weeks before his due date, endangering her life. After the baby's birth and Laura's wedding, Roger's concerns turn to the one daughter remaining at home. Deborah works constantly at her school, and spends her free hours agitating for reforms and financial support to help the families living in the tenements. Roger is disturbed by this, especially given his prejudices against the immigrant families Deborah works with, but a visit to Deborah's school changes his perspective. He takes a crippled Irish boy named John into his care, providing him with lodging and a job in Roger's news clipping office downtown. When summer arrives, the family goes to spend most of it on the old family farm in New Hampshire. At the farm, Edith's oldest son, George, is happiest, pursuing his interest in becoming a farmer someday; Edith's husband, Bruce Cunningham, spends most of his time racing around the backroads on his brand-new automobile. That following winter, Roger becomes concerned about his daughter, Deborah, whose suitor Allan Baird, a doctor and friend of the family, seems to be giving up hope of marriage. Roger conspires with his daughter Edith and her husband Bruce to pressure Deborah, and she eventually accepts Allan's proposal. His Family was praised by many critics at the time of its publication. The Oakland Tribune, in its review on May 27, 1917, said -in this story of Roger Gale's family, Ernest Poole has pictured remarkably well present-day Americans. It is significant, intellectual and stimulating--a story of today.- The New York Times profiled the book in its review of -notable fiction- for 1917, calling it -a fine successor to The Harbor, Poole's first novel.- When Poole's first novel, The Harbor came out in 1915 it was a critical and popular success but the Pulitzer Prize did not yet exist. When his second novel His Family came out in 1918, the -consensus is that it's the lesser of the two works, that the Pulitzer committee was really honoring Poole for The Harbor-.

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