Pulitzer Book Club Inclusion Guide
"Early Autumn"
by Louis Bromfield
INCLUSION MILESTONES
1927
• Fur & Leather Workers strike leads to 40-hour work week.
• U.S. 40 first coast‐to‐coast highway
• DeFord Bailey first Black Grand Ole Opry performer
AUTHOR INSPIRATIONS
After WWI service, Ivy leaguer Bromfield married, published his first novel, then moved to an ancient village north of Paris. He wrote Early Autumn and several other novels in France as he socialized with Hemingway and other Lost Generation artists. Bromfield’s grandparents had horses on their Ohio farm; Louis grew 350+ varieties of flowers in his French garden.
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– Share your key take-away about inclusion in this book in a sentence or two.
– Write a paragraph or two (up to 250 words) to describe your thoughts on exclusion/inclusion in the book, why you related or did not connect with the book, and why you think reading, inclusion and dialog about inclusion matter.
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Dirty secrets, conniving, propriety of fading, wannabe Boston dynasty.
Rich married lady horseback riding in country with daughter and hot Irish politician.
Woman in undesired control of family fortune.
Reads longer than 338 pages, 13 hours
You’re married to your partner’s family if you live with them.
Insulation and social distancing of money. Mass Bay Colony descendants social credential. Goal: marry daughters to wealthy well-known local. Stigmas: divorce, nerdiness, mental illness, red hair, bastard. Democrat & Irish bashing (shanty, dishonest, corrupt politicians, drinkers).
“Negro music” described as obscene and noisy. Polish mill workers defined as an underclass. Ladies versus flashy, horsey, and common women. Invalid son, mentally ill grandmother, unhappy lady of character who sacrifices life for daughter’s happiness.
Despite plenty of champagne, salads, cold lobster, sandwiches, hot chicken in chafing dishes, and other forms of 1920s splendor, your party may flop/not lead to your granddaughter’s marriage.
“There is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself. Nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty.”
Solemn old New England manor house that feels like wealth and history with a side order of dullness and despair.
Shabby gentile, not chic. Piano wanting. Drawing room needs renno; ancestor portraits are grim.
Weigh the trade-offs between personal happiness, ambition, and sacrifice for others.
How do secrets affect the way people are viewed?
How insulated and insular is this family and how does that play out in terms of prejudices and behavior?
What is the perspective on pity in this novel?
Compare the roles and power of women in this book.
Talk about propriety, Puritanical values, repression of feelings, disillusion, outcasting, and ignoring truthful uncomfortable statements/realities. To what extent have Puritanical-ish attitudes/behaviors evolved during the past 100 years?
Discuss romance, sex, divorce, and rationales for enduring loveless marriages.
Who is manipulated in the novel and how?
Describe the nature of the family’s caretaking.
In what ways does death connect the characters?
Discuss focus on genealogy via portrait gallery, family/Mass Bay Colony book project, and letters in the attic. How would you talk about your family if your ancestors included a privateer supplier, witch burner, evangelist, shipper of enslaved people, and a doomed adulteress?
Hunt outside Boston for fictional Durham village complete with vast coastal estate, then take train into Boston for your non-existent job.Tour brownstones, admire Sargent portraits at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Consider side-trip to Lucas, Ohio where Bromfield created Malabar Farm to escape tensions building in Europe prior to WW2. See the 32-room Big House and its art collection. Stop at foot of staircase where Bromfield was best man at Bogart/Bacall wedding. Enjoy 900-acre Malabar Farm State Park and trails. See wildflowers, go horseback riding with someone you will never marry.
Bromfield was a screenwriter and adapted many of his stories and novels into films, but the movie to be titled Conquest, adaptation of Early Autumn, was never produced.
Early Autumn is third novel in what Bromfield called the “panel set” which included The Green Bay Tree (1924), Possession (1925), and A Good Woman (1927). He published ten more novels in addition to non-fiction. His non-fiction, including Malabar Farm (1948), addressed post-Dust Bowl U.S. agriculture and proposed new farming methods to reduce soil erosion and improve soil health.