His Family

His Family is a novel by Ernest Poole received the first Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1918. His Family 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. The story begins with Roger Gale, New York businessman, reflecting on the changes that have come to New York since his arrival in the city as a young man from a New Hampshire farm somewhere near the time of the Civil War. He is driven by his wife's dying request to remain close to their three daughters, yet he feels very distant from them—this despite the fact that the younger two live in the family home with him, and Edith, who is married with four children, visits him regularly.