His Family

Roger Gale is an aging New York widower trying to hold on to his three grown daughters as the city and its manners change around him. One throws herself into teaching immigrant children, another builds a conventional family of her own, and the third pursues her own ambitions and pleasures, each pulling the household in a different direction. Poole uses the family as a lens on a restless, modernizing America in the years before the First World War. Published in 1917, the novel won the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded for fiction. Free to read here as a PDF and EPUB edition.