About this Item
As new condition full textured green leather hardcover boards with elaborately decorated gold front and rear cover design, gold spine lettering and decorations, gold gilt page edges on all three sides, gold moire fabric front and rear endsheets, traditional four-hubbed spine, a bound-into-the-volume matching gold satin ribbon page marker, and all pages are sewn into the binding (not glued). Also includes a Preliminary Page Note about the Book and Author. Illustrated with drawings plus a double-page frontispiece drawing by Dennis Luczak. "Margaret Wilson's first novel, The Able McLaughlins, a story of a Scottish community in Iowa in the 1860's, was greeted with great respect when it appeared in 1923. First it was selected as the Harper Prize Novel for that year, over seven hundred fifty other entrants. Then it received that most prestigious American literary award, the Pulitzer Prize. The critics praised Margaret Wilson's realistic presentation of the life of Scottish immigrants and the atmosphere of a particular time and place that she so convincingly recreated. Historian Allan Nevins wrote in The Literary Review: "Miss Wilson's volume is fresh, spare, and sure. It tries to achieve intensity rather than extent. it grips the interest, displays great skill in construction and keen insight into human nature and strikes a note of fine feeling." Nevins concluded that the novel was "a good tale adroitly told," a story "at once simple and poignant." The Atlantic was enthusiastic: "The plot is an old one, but it is fresh-minted by Miss Wilson's skill. Every situation serves to show forth the conflict between hate and love." The character of the book, which one critic described as the breath of "fresh prairie winds," has been interpreted in the unique illustrations of Dennis Luczak. A Warren Olde Style Wove book paper was made to carry Luczak's drawings. The text is set in Electra. Margaret Wilson's own life was a full one. She was born in Iowa in 1882, into a family she described as "poor but storng and loving farmers." Her own childhood provided her with insights into the ways of the Scottish immigrants who peopled her novels. She studied at the University of Chicago, then spent some time in India as a missionary before returning to teach. In 1923, the year The Able McLaughlins was published, she married C.D. Turner, an Englishman, and moved to England, where she spent the rest of her life. She wrote several other novels, whose subjects reflected her varied experiences and interest: India, criminology (her husband was at one time warden of Dartmoor Prison), her native Middle West. Among her other books are The Kenworthys (1925), Daughters of India (1928), Trousers of Taffeta (1929), The Valiant Wife (1933), Law and the McLaughlins (1937) and a work of nonfiction, The Crime of Punishment (1931). Margaret Wilson once described herself as a writer who wrote "consciously and unconsciously for women, and from a point of view entirely feminine." In the feminist-conscious 1970's, that is a provocative description. In The Able McLaughlins you can explore just what Miss WIlson meant." -- The Franklin Library, from the Preliminary Page. ". Seller Inventory # 006655
Bibliographic Details
Title: The Able McLaughlins [LEATHERBOUND LIMITED ...
Publisher: The Franklin Library, Franklin Center, Pennsylvania
Publication Date: 1977
Binding: Hardcover
Illustrator: Luczak, Dennis
Condition: As New
Edition: Limited Edition
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