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This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Ernest Cook Poole was an American novelist and journalist.
Background
He was born on January 23, 1880 in Chicago, Illinois, United States, the second son and fifth of seven children of Mary Nevin (Howe) Poole, daughter of one of Chicago's original settlers, and Abram Poole, a wealthy grain broker of Dutch descent. The name Vanderpoel had been simplified by Ernest's great-grandfather in rural New York.
His mother, an earnest Presbyterian, balanced intelligent and humane child-rearing with a full life in Chicago society and charity, while his father, a hard-driving selfmade capitalist, indulged a love of music and theater. An older sister, Bertha, married the liberal economist and writer Walter Weyl, and Abram, their younger brother, achieved recognition as a painter. Ernest's ordinary active boyhood in Chicago and nearby Lake Forest was enhanced by frequent trips east.
Education
He attended the University School for Boys in Chicago. In 1898 the short, wiry youth followed his older brother Ralph to Princeton University, occupying the room in Brown Hall where the novelist Booth Tarkington, later Poole's friend, had lived ten years earlier. Hard work rather than innate genius led to graduation with the A. B. degree cum laude in 1902, with honors in history, jurisprudence, and politics.
He studied and imitated Tolstoi, Turgenev, Maupassant, and Stevenson and found in Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives an impetus to make New York slum dwellers his initial subject matter.
Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Abraham Cahan taught the young writer techniques for gathering and handling his teeming materials, while his mounting social concern was nurtured by activists such as his brother-in-law Walter Weyl, Arthur Bullard, Robert Hunter, and J. G. Phelps Stokes.
Career
Two years as a social worker with the University Settlement on New York's Lower East Side revealed to him the astonishing diversity and vigor of human existence in the frantic metropolis, which later became a donnée of his novels. He investigated firsthand the poverty, disease, and exploitation that awaited immigrants and sold his first piece to McClure's in 1903.
Commissioned to report on labor racketeering in Chicago, Poole returned to his hometown in 1904 and soon turned into a publicist for striking stockyard workers. The 1905 St. Petersburg, Russia, massacre impelled him to seek a wider perspective on mass social movements. Secretly carrying money and messages for the revolutionaries, he made the first of numerous trips abroad as a magazine correspondent. With a congenial guide-translator, he visited remote villages, and his fresh and vigorous dispatches for the Outlook constitute probably his best magazine writing. Poole then wrote and published a novel, The Voice of the Street (1906), inexpertly handling the grim, but fascinating, New York material that he continued to place successfully in the Saturday Evening Post and elsewhere.
Poole finally joined the Socialist party, frequently contributing to its paper, the New York Call. A serious attempt at playwriting produced twelve scripts, usually with social messages. Most of them were torn up by Poole, but three had modestly successful productions. The Harbor, Poole's semiautobiographical second novel and his only book usually noted in literary histories, appeared in 1915. Further critical success came almost immediately with His Family (1917), a study of three sisters exemplifying roles available to modern women: reckless high society, dull domesticity, and frenetic social service. It won the first Pulitzer Prize offered in fiction. These two novels marked the apex of Poole's career.
In 1914 he had reported World War I from the front lines. Then, breaking with the pacifism of his socialist friends, Poole switched from journalist to propagandist, joining the Committee on Public Information headed by George Creel. A 1917 visit to Russia during the Kerensky government resulted in articles assembled into short books: The Dark People (1918), The Village (1919), The Little Dark Man (1925).
From 1915 to 1924 each of Poole's seven novels sold 12, 000 copies or more; but of his next seven, only one, Silent Storms (1927), about an unsuccessful French-American marriage, went above 8, 000 copies. He did not write another book for six years; indeed, his literary output in the 1930's dwindled to column-long letters in the New York Times, typically urging dollars for Bowery missions.
Giving up his regular writing routine, he pursued the stock market, feeling morally obliged to recoup his depression losses for his children, while Margaret Poole's inherited money maintained the family's comfortable existence. His perennial love of heroism stimulated a visit to the Kentucky mountains, which resulted in a successful book of nonfiction, Nurses on Horseback (1932), but in 1936 his publisher, for the first time in twenty-five years, rejected a novel he submitted.
When World War II broke out, his offer to serve again as government propagandist was refused. Two of his last three books resurrected his old journalistic talent for readable, action-filled narrative. Giants Gone (1943) saluted twenty big-shouldered heroes of his native city, but The Great White Hills of New Hampshire (1946) showed his personal roots well transplanted into the rocky soil that had nurtured many other brave lovers of hard labor and privacy.
Before Robert Frost became his Grafton County neighbor and walking companion, Poole had built White Pines, a house of stone and spruce halfway between Franconia and Sugar Hill. There he wrote books, served on the school board, and listened to native lore. Additional oral material combined with serious research to produce an honest, and even racy, series of topical vignettes, and Great White Hills justly became a best-seller.
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Religion
The former Socialist was confirmed in the Episcopal church sometime after his sixtieth year.
Politics
Poole was slow to join the growing Socialist Party of America (SPA), initially resisting joining.
Views
Poole refused to submerge readers in lust or "sneers and gloom. " He regarded such contemporaries as H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O'Neill as too often morally adrift and engulfed in cynicism. He prided himself on realism, but a realism allowing for safe green shores beyond the maelstrom. Although a careful reviser, achieving absolute simplicity of syntax and vocabulary, Poole cared little for subtleties of character development, stylistic experiment, or a controlled point of view.
Quotations:
He declared in 1924, "There's no excuse for writing unless there's some great message to give".
Personality
Frail in appearance, shy and nervous but possessed of a temper, Poole never tried to compete with the brilliant raconteurs of his age. He considered himself "a poor talker but a good listener. " He was a clubman, and stayed aloof from the Village avant-garde and the expatriate colony, being temperamentally at home with neither.
Connections
On February 12, 1907, he married Margaret Winterbotham, whom he had first met when she was a Lake Forest debutante. They settled in Greenwich Village and grew more active in reform movements. He was the father of three children: William Morris, Nicholas, and Elizabeth Ann.