The Able McLaughlins

A Library of America eBook Classic

Fiction & Literature, Saga, Family Life, Literary
Cover of the book The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson, Library of America
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Author: Margaret Wilson ISBN: 9781598535938
Publisher: Library of America Publication: February 26, 2019
Imprint: Library of America Language: English
Author: Margaret Wilson
ISBN: 9781598535938
Publisher: Library of America
Publication: February 26, 2019
Imprint: Library of America
Language: English

The riveting Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, available as an e-book for the first time.

Wully McLaughlin returns to his family’s Iowa homestead at the end of the Civil War to find his sweetheart, Chirstie McNair, alone and in distress, her mother dead and her wayward father gone. Perplexed by a new aloofness in Chirstie, Wully soon discovers that she has been raped and is pregnant. To the shock of his parents and the tight-knit Scottish community in which they live, he marries Chirstie and claims the child, and the shame of its early birth, as his own. But the lingering presence of Chirstie’s attacker sets in motion a series of events that pit the desire for revenge against a reluctance to perpetuate the cycle of violence.
 
Often compared to Willa Cather’s One of Ours and Edna Ferber’s So Big for its earthy realism, its portrait of an immigrant community, and its depiction of Midwestern farm life, Margaret Wilson’s provocative debut novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1924, is ripe for rediscovery. In a recent reappraisal Judy Cornes commends the novel’s “feeling for time and place: a sense of the unrelenting forces that both history and nature impose on the individual. . . . The Able McLaughlins remains an engrossing story with characters who constantly engage our attention.”

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

The riveting Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, available as an e-book for the first time.

Wully McLaughlin returns to his family’s Iowa homestead at the end of the Civil War to find his sweetheart, Chirstie McNair, alone and in distress, her mother dead and her wayward father gone. Perplexed by a new aloofness in Chirstie, Wully soon discovers that she has been raped and is pregnant. To the shock of his parents and the tight-knit Scottish community in which they live, he marries Chirstie and claims the child, and the shame of its early birth, as his own. But the lingering presence of Chirstie’s attacker sets in motion a series of events that pit the desire for revenge against a reluctance to perpetuate the cycle of violence.
 
Often compared to Willa Cather’s One of Ours and Edna Ferber’s So Big for its earthy realism, its portrait of an immigrant community, and its depiction of Midwestern farm life, Margaret Wilson’s provocative debut novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1924, is ripe for rediscovery. In a recent reappraisal Judy Cornes commends the novel’s “feeling for time and place: a sense of the unrelenting forces that both history and nature impose on the individual. . . . The Able McLaughlins remains an engrossing story with characters who constantly engage our attention.”

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