Finished: His Family (Poole) The book that received the first ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1918. It's a pretty good book, but a bit cut and dried, if that's a good way to describe it. The story is about Roger Gale, a widower approaching sixty, with three grown daughters, all living in New York in the early 1910's. Upon her death, Roger's wife had begged him to remain involved in his daughter's lives, and he has. Roger, having grown up on a family farm in New Hampshire, is often deep in his thoughts about the quick-changing, "modern" New York. He wonders if his daughters will change along with the city. His oldest, Edith, is married with four children and one on the way. Her primary motivation is being a mother and wife and taking care of her little family. She's very judgemental about any woman who doesn't want to follow the path of being a mother and wife. His second daughter, Deborah, is a teacher/administrator who works tirelessly in the tenements of the city where people from all nationalities have settled in America. She runs a school for the mostly poor population and has grand ideas about an education being more about helping these families face life than teaching the kids math, etc. She is, in essence, about helping ALL the children, and not just her own children. She isn't married, but has a suitor, Dr. Allan Baird, who would love to marry her. He does not expect her to give up being the independent, hard-working woman she is, but he thinks they can do it all together. The third daughter is Laura. She's the spoiled, self-centered socialite of the family. She never has a regard for anyone but herself. She marries a rich young man, and declares she will never have children. When World War I hits, Roger Gale's finances are stretched to the limit, as he's trying to support himself, Deborah, and now Edith and her five children because Edith's husband has been killed in an automobile accident. Times are tough, and while Laura and her war-profiteering husband are getting richer and richer, Roger wouldn't dream of asking them for money, so the rest of them suffer. Eventually, after alot of sacrifice, Roger's business begins to take an upward swing again. He decides to settle Edith and her children on his New Hampshire farm, and this is fine with both her and her oldest son, who wants to make a go at farming. He's written off Laura because after two years of marriage, Laura cheats on her husband with his Italian war-profiteering partner, and gets a divorce and marries the partner, moving to Rome. Roger is mostly worried about Deborah, because she has worked so hard and witnessed so much poverty of the school children that she keeps declining Allan's proposal of marriage, even though she loves him. Finally, Roger goes to his own doctor one day and finds out that he's got an illness and only about a year to live. He lays down the law to Deborah and tells her she's being dumb to not take Allan into her life and have a child of her own if that's what she wants because when he dies, she'll be all alone. She takes this to heart and she and Allan are married. Deborah does get to keep doing her work, but she becomes pregnant and has a very difficult childbirth where both she and the baby almost die. It is precarious for awhile, but they both make it through. Finally, when the baby is thriving and all is going better, then Roger starts his own decline in health. Each of his daughters comes to visit him in his waning hours, even Laura, who has scoured the city to find her father's beloved antique ring collection that he had to sell the first year of the war. Her only selfless act of the book. As the book ends, Roger is drifting off over the mountains to his loved ones who have gone before him. I think this was a pretty good book, but the author referred alot to the New England no-nonsense demeanor of the people in the northeast, and I kind of feel like that's the way he wrote the book...without much emotion. Anyway, I guess it was pretty good, but I'd love to know what other books were up for the Pulitzer that year! :-)