There will be no plot spoilers below.
Title: His Family
Author: Ernest Poole
Number of Pages: 219
Original Published Date: 1917
Pulitzer Prize Winner (Fiction): 1918 (First Pulitzer Prize winner under Novel category)
Favorite Sentence(s): Then from somewhere far away a great bell began booming the hour, and it roused him from his revery…And as he listened it seemed to say, “There is still time, but you have not long.”
He wanted to cry out to her, “You’ll always be just starting! You’ll never be sure, you’ll never be happy, you’ll always be just beginning to be! And the happier you are, the more you will feel it is only a start!…And then-”
Introduction
I find it fascinating that I’d never heard of Ernest Poole’s novel His Family prior to finding it on the Pulitzer Prize (PP) winners list. Considering this won the first ever PP for Novel (category later changed to Fiction in 1948), one may assume that this book would have appeared in a list of books available to write an essay on in one of my English Composition classes in high school or college, or on a separate list of “Great American Novels”, but neither the name Ernest Poole or his novel His Family had ever entered my lexicon. As of January 2026, it’s ranked #326 in Classic American Fiction on Amazon and only has 2,282 ratings on Goodreads. To put that in perspective, The Age of Innocence, which won the Pulitzer two years later, has more than 195k reviews. Granted, a Martin Scorsese movie was made staring Daniel-Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer so that obviously gives it a huge advantage (although the movie came out 70+ years after publication), but I remember The Age of Innocence being an option for essay writing in high school because my friend chose that title.
Perhaps I had not stretched myself to look for novels outside of the usual recommendations or, and is often the case, this novel simply hasn’t stood the “test of time” in popular culture for one reason or another. I can’t say why this novel isn’t more popular, but I recommend its reading as I truly appreciated it for it giving me a glimpse of what life was like during the turn of the 20th century and the novel’s themes of personal relationships and a well-lived life that is part of the human experience.
This review won’t give a detailed summary of the events that take place in the book, but rather I will discuss the some of the insights I received from reading this novel. A quick synopsis of His Family centers mostly around Roger Gale, a widower and businessman, with three daughters in their 20s and 30s. Told mostly from the point-of-view of 60-year-old Gale, the book takes us through his reflections, reactions, and resistance to the rapidly-changing traditions and culture occurring around him in New York City during the early 1900s. In a way, it’s a coming-of-age story from a character near the end of his life.
His focus is mostly on his daughters, with trying to understand them and know them better for his dead wife. Since his wife’s death, Roger has lost his faith in God but he still believes that he will somehow meet his wife again, so he therefore must get to know his children better because his wife would want to hear about them when they reconnect.
Novel Themes
A theme in this novel is the sense of living an unfinished life and the regrets that follow us as a consequence to existing in the world. Life has an unfairness to it and good people are often dealt great tragedy, yet life keeps moving and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Poole uses his main character, Roger, to express to the reader that it doesn’t feel like we get enough time to do what we ought and what we’d planned. Before her death, Judith, Roger’s wife tells him “I wonder if it won’t be the same with the children as it has been with us. No matter how long each one of them lives, won’t their lives feel to them unfinished like ours, only just beginning? I wonder how far they will go. And then their children will grow up and it will be the same with them. Unfinished lives.”
Since this book takes place in New York City in the early 1900s, it functions as a time capsule of society and what was expected, accepted, or shunned during those days. It’s almost like reading a history book, but instead of facts, we’re gifted with a narrator giving a tour of the city and a true understanding of how society functioned in a way that can’t quite be envisioned today. This is one of the great benefits of reading older books. Books written in their time can provide a new perspective that we can use to compare and contrast with modern times.
In His Family, much is written on women defying their expected role in society and paving new paths for themselves. This parallels with first wave feminism. Through the daughter characters, Poole describes three very different woman with different ideas on how a woman should or could live their life during those days. Each one chooses a unique path for themselves and Roger Gale tries to understand and learn to support their differences, in contrast from the past generations he was familiar with.
Some other reflections on the transformations from the novel’s time period to ours,
Other examples that reflect the transformations in the hundred years since His Family was published is the vast improvement in modern medicine; doctors and hospitals can now save our lives from something that would have easily killed us a hundred years earlier. Also, the abundant food supply most of us have access to, and the ability to travel nearly anywhere in the world in hours instead of days or months have enriched our lives. These are modern miracles.
The narrator is awed when he’s invited to ride as a passenger in an expensive sports car with a speed reaching 63 MPH. The speed is an absolute wonder for that time, but nothing many of us would appreciate today since it’s a common occurrence. This disparity is a snippet of how technology has changed and how we’ve adjusted to a new norm. One character can foresee those changes and states “They’ll look back on a mile a minute as we look back on stage coach days,” which seems prophetic. There’s also the foretelling of using the sun instead of coal to fuel cars. We haven’t quite arrived to that but in place of solar energy for cars, we now have batteries.
A most surprising fact, if I may call it that, to demonstrate society in that day is how fast a death penalty was carried out. In the story, a young man shoots and kills his ex and her new man in a jealous, drunken rage. He’s quickly convicted and sentenced to death. After his unsuccessful appeal, he is scheduled for the ‘chair’ and his sentence is carried out. It doesn’t explicitly state how long this process took, but one can infer it was just a few short years. Compare this to today where a death sentence can take more than a decade to carry out and inmates get multiple stages to appeal and at multiple levels.
Conclusion
I began reading this in November 2024, got two chapters in, put it down, then didn’t pick it back up until November 2025. It wasn’t until I told myself I needed to finish this book so I could continue my quest of reading all the Pulitzer Prize fictions winners that I finally sat back down with it and completed the reading a few weeks later without any issues. This is not the kind of book where a lot of action or an intricate plot unfolds over the chapters, as little happens in the book besides the characters dealing with their progressing lives and with each other, but isn’t that how it is with most of us? We impact those around us and are all but forgotten by the world. This is not a tragedy.
If one is looking for a book that gives an honest look at city life in the early 1900s and the slice-of-life we all can connect with, I highly recommend His Family. This novel is a beautiful look at the short life we all have and how in the end, our relationships and the people we love are what make life worth living. This novel is a just a story about a man and his family and I found the simplicity of that to be very impactful.
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