Pulitzer Book Club Inclusion Guide
"His Family"
by Ernst Poole
INCLUSION MILESTONES
1918
• Influenza pandemic prompts masking, social distancing, hospital isolation
• Armistice agreement ends WWI fighting
AUTHOR INSPIRATIONS
Poole grew up with servants, summer house, and six siblings. Became a socialist. After Princeton, lived, served, and wrote in an impoverished section of NYC at University Settlement House which provided courses and clubs for immigrants.
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Featured Reader Wanted!
Featured Reader
– 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.
– Identify the name and website address of a cause you support with an inclusive mission.
Widower struggles with daughters’ issues and meaning of family.
Entrepreneur creates press clipping business.
First Pulitzer novel/fiction winner.
Feels like more than 320 pages
Seek your chosen family and accept that your biological family might not see the world as you do.
All about a white family. Eldest daughter prioritizes own children over everyone else. Youngest daughter is into herself and rejects tradition. Middle daughter considers her diverse school population with limited resources who live in tenements her chosen family. Father views Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants as people who “spoiled his neighborhood.” Ultimately welcomes disabled Irish boy into his home and business; calls him a “cripple.”
Slur used to label a Japanese cook and butler.
Man in his 50s considered “old."
Prepare a meal without using kitchen tools or food unavailable in NYC in 1918.
Choose between an ample Sunday dinner or the opposite – what a family with very limited resources would eat.
“You look up at the stars. There are millions. You are only a speck of dust – on one.”
Meet in a school, ideally an old one, either indoors or outdoors. Have photos at the ready that show what schools, tenements, and other homes in NYC were like in 1918.
What made you upset or uncomfortable when you read this novel? Did anything positive come from that in terms of your thought process?
Discuss views toward immigrants over time in the book and society.
Talk about the challenges people have who live in tenements in the novel and now.
How was a person with a physical disability and his mother viewed in this novel?
How have the social and educational reforms presented the novel played out over time?
Why was capital punishment referenced in the novel?
What do family, marriage, and neighbors mean in this novel in the context of both inclusion and exclusion?
How were understanding of and acceptance of the needs of others and change explored?
What were the expectations of and boundaries on women when the novel was published compared to today?
Talk about guilt, loss, aging, war, and other motivations to do right by others.
Does this novel feel like it was written by a white man more than 100 years ago? Why/why not?
Get on the train or in an antique car and go to the Tenement Museum in the NY’s Lower East Side and the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. Head to The Museum of the City of New York to see the Settlement Houses exhibition if it’s still running.
If you’re flush, add on a trip to New England for a farm stay.
No adaptations of Ernst Poole work found.
His Second Wife (1918), Voice of the Street (1906), The Harbor (1915), Blind (1920), Beggars’ Gold (1921), Millions (1922), The Avalanche (1924), Silent Storms (1927), Nurses On Horseback (1932).