Monday, January 29, 2007

Years of Grace

Written in 1930, Years of Grace is a chronicle of American life beginning with the Gay Nineties (1890's that is) and ending in the late Roaring Twenties, at the threshold of the stock market crash of 1929. It covers the life of Jane Ward, from when she was a girl in Chicago, through an aspiring youth, a marriage with Bostonian Stephen Carver, World War I, and the post war boom years. The book is an illustration of American society during this fascinating time period.

Years of Grace won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1931. To see a first edition of the book click here:

First Edition of Years of Grace .

From the first edition dust jacket:

"Margaret Ayer Barnes might never have written anything more than a letter if it had not been for a serious automobile accident in France which occurred about three years ago on the road from Rouen to Paris. This misadventure kept her flat on her back for months, and during this time she began to write short stories and plot out scenes for novels and plays. Harper’s, the Pictorial Review, and the Red Book published her stories as fast as they were written, and later they were brought together in book form under the title 'Prevailing Winds.' Katherine Cornell played in her dramatization of 'The Age of Innocence' and in her 'Dishonered Lady,' written in collaboration with Edward Sheldon. 'Years of Grace' is her first novel."

"Mrs. Marnes is a prominent Chicagoan, a sister of the novelist Janet Fairbank, and was for three years a director of Bryn Mawr College."

"…It definitely places Mrs. Barnes with that little group of American women writers who can be depended upon always to give us keen fictional entertainment and that tingling sense of recognition which is the reader’s deepest pleasure."

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