His Family

His Family, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Ernest Poole 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.

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]."

Ernest Cook Poole (January 23, 1880 - January 10, 1950) was an American novelist. He was born in Chicago, Illinois he graduated from Princeton University during 1902. Working as a journalist he was active in promoting social reforms including the ending of child labor. He was a correspondent for the American magazine The Saturday Evening Post in Europe before and during World War I. His novel The Harbor (1915) is the work for which he is known best. It is set largely among the proletariat of the industrial Brooklyn waterfront, and is sympathetic with socialism. It is considered one of the first American fictional works to present a positive opinion of trade unions. During 1917, for the magazine The New Republic he went to Russia to report on the Russian Revolution. The novel His Family, concerning a New York family, made him the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (1918). According to one commentator: ＂The consensus is that it’s the lesser of the two works, that the Pulitzer committee was really honoring Poole for The Harbor＂.