Friday, November 16, 2007

Early Autumn




I finished Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield yesterday. It won the Pulitzer in 1927. It reminded me a lot of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, which won the Pulitzer in 1921. One of the characters in Bromfield's novel even thinks, "Her mother, she saw now, belonged to the America of the nineties. She saw her now less as a real person than a character out of a novel by Mrs. Wharton." Early Autumn, while set in the mid 1920s, is chock-full of such characters, who consider money, rank and family lineage as the most important factors of life. I found the book a bit depressing and not as enjoyable as that earlier one "by Mrs. Wharton."

Having now read the first decade of the Pulitzer winners I can recommend "His Family (1918) by Ernest Poole, The Able McLaughlins (1924) by Margaret Wilson, So Big (1925) by Edna Ferber and Arrowsmith (1926) by Sinclair Lewis.

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