Ellen Glasgow: Contribution as American Novelist

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      Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), was born in Richmond, Virginia, the old capital of the Southern Confederacy. She published her first novel The Descendent (1897) and her only volume of poetry The Freeman and Other Poems (1902). The economic and social conditions of the old agrarian south form the subject of her series of historical novels: The Voice of the People (1900), The Battle-ground (1902), The Deliverance (1904) The Wheel of Life (1906), The Ancient Law (1908) The Romance of as Plain Man (1909), and The Miller of the Old Church (1911). Her next two novels — Virginia (1913) and Life and Gabriella (1916) examine the position of women in the modernization of the south. Her other novels are - The Builders (1919), One Man in His Time (1922) and Barren Ground (1925), The Romantic Comediam (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), The Sheltered Life (1932), Vein of Iron (1935).

      In 1941, Glasgow was awarded Pulitzer Prize for a novel, Our Life (1941) is a study of the decay of the aristocratic Virginia family. She also published two big volumes of short stories - Shadowy Third (1923) and Collected Stories (1963). Her realistic novels examine the transformation of the South from a rural to an industrial economy. Mature works such as Virginia (1912) focus on the southern experience while later novels like
Barren Ground (1925) - acknowledged as her best dramatizing gifted women attempting to surmount the claustrophobic, traditional southern code of domesticity, piety, and dependence for women. A Certain Measure (1943) is a book of prefatory essays to her novels, a autobiographical The Woman Within (1954) is an reminiscence.

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