The sheltered life / Ellen Glasgow.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Glasgow, Ellen, 1873-1945.

Language:

English

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

xxiv, 395 pages ; 21 cm

Edition:

First Harvest/HBJ edition.

Place of Publication:

San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985, c1932.

Summary:

Acclaimed as Ellen Glasgow's tour de force, The Sheltered Life stands as one of the most stirring epitaphs to the romantic South in American literature. In the town of Queenborough, Virginia, the Archbalds and the Birdsongs, the two remaining families on Washington Street, hold their ground and attempt to ignore the industrial invasion in the years before the first World War. Told from two perspectives--the wise outlook of elderly General Archbald, a civilized man in an uncivilized world, and the romantic vantage point of Jenny Blair, his impetuous grandchild--the story is a vivid parable of a society in decline. Unaware of the disaster unfolding around them, the two households cling blindly to a dream that has died, as the crumbling of their shelters--religion, convention, and social prejudice--gradually destroys the fragile order of their lives.

First published in 1938, The Sheltered Life was hailed by Alfred Kazin as Ellen Glasgow's "most moving and penetrating novel. Like Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, which it closely resembles in spirit, The Sheltered Life became a haunting study in social decomposition." A modern masterpiece, The Sheltered Life resonates with the charm, courage, vitality, and inevitable tragedy of a proud and vanishing age.

Born in 1873 to a mother of the Tidewater aristocracy and a father who manufactured cannon for the Confederacy, Ellen Glasgow became a self-taught scholar and one of the most important modern novelists of the South. Precursor of William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams, she produced 22 works in a career that spanned four decades. She was awarded the Howells Medal in 1940, the Southern Authors Prize in 1941, and, for In This Our Life, the Pulitzer Prize in 1942, a few years before her death in Richmond, Virginia.

Contents:

Part I The Age of Make-Believe 3

Part II The Deep Past 129

Part III The Illusion 169.

Notes:

"A Harvest/HBJ book."

ISBN:

0156816903

OCLC:

12238019