His Family

Roger Gale is a widower navigating 1910s Manhattan with three daughters from two marriages, each one a different answer to the question of what women should become in this transformed America. One daughter chases wealth and social position. One clings to old virtues and domesticity. One throws herself into the radical currents of the age. As the city electrifies and the old ways crack apart, Roger discovers he cannot hold his family together by force of will alone. Ernest Poole's Pulitzer-winning novel captures the decade when America reinvented itself, using one man's struggle to contain his fractured family as a prism for understanding a nation tearing itself between what it was and what it might become. The novel endures because it understands that the personal is always political, that every family is a small war between generations, and that love is not enough to stop change.