Ernest Poole

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Poole, Ernest (1880–1950), born in Chicago, graduated from Princeton (1902) and lived at University Settlement, New York City, while working for the abolition of child labor and for other social reforms. He helped Upton Sinclair gather material for The Jungle, and then published his first novel, The Voice of the Street (1906), depicting New York's impoverished Lower East Side. New York was also a major setting for his major novel, The Harbor (1915). He also served as a war correspondent in Germany and France, going to Russia (1917) to view the October Revolution sympathetically and at first hand. His Family (1917, Pulitzer Prize) treats changing standards in U.S. life.

Making his home in New York, Poole continued his literary career with a long succession of novels and stories, including His Second Wife (1918), about a woman who married her widowed brother‐in‐law and wages a long struggle with the influence of her dead sister; The Dark People (1918) and The Village (1918), sketches of Russian peasant life; Blind (1920), a semi‐autobiographical novel of tenement life in New York, the European war, and revolution in Russia; Beggars' Gold (1921), the story of a teacher who achieves his dream of visiting China; Millions (1922), an ironic tale of a family awaiting the death of a relative who, unknown to them, has lost his fortune; Danger (1923), concerned with a neurotic woman who wrecks the lives of her brother and sister‐in‐law; The Avalanche (1924), dealing with the conflict between a neurologist's ideals and his wife's desire for success; The Hunter's Moon (1925), telling of a boy's dream of a trip to the peaceful woods, away from his loveless home; The Little Dark Man (1925), Russian sketches; With Eastern Eyes (1926), describing a Russian scientist's reactions to American society; Silent Storms (1927), a novel dealing with the conflicting standards of an American financier and his young French wife; The Car of Croesus (1930), about Russian visitors in the U.S.; The Destroyer (1931), about a conflict between brothers; Nurses on Horseback (1932), an account of the frontier nursing service in the Kentucky mountains; Great Winds (1933), contrasting the complex life of a modern family with its New Hampshire background; One of Us (1934), describing changed New England life as seen by an old storekeeper; and The Nancy Flyer (1949), about a New Hampshire stagecoach builder.

Nonfiction includes The Bridge (1940), autobiography; Giants Gone: Men Who Made Chicago (1943); and The Great White Hills of New Hampshire (1946), about the state where he lived.

Ernest Poole , 1880–1950, American writer, b. Chicago, grad. Princeton, 1902. He was a magazine correspondent in Russia, France, and Germany before and during World War I. His best-known novel is The Harbor (1915), a story about changing industry on the Brooklyn waterfront. His Family (1917; Pulitzer Prize) is a portrait of a New York family. Among his other works are The Little Dark Man and Other Russian Sketches (1925); Giants Gone: Men Who Made Chicago (1943); and Great White Hills of New Hampshire (1946).

Bibliography: See his autobiography, The Bridge (1940).