Ernest Cook Poole (1880-1950), journalist and fiction writer, is best known as the author of

The Harbor

, an acclaimed socialist novel of 1915 that profoundly influenced the generation of political radicals and progressives that came of age during the first World War.

The Harbor

, an important but largely forgotten landmark in American literary history, describes the political conversion of a middle-class young man to active sympathy with the labor movement. After

The Harbor

made Poole famous, his literary reputation reached its peak when his next novel,

His Family

, won the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1917.

Largely because his emergence as a writer was closely tied to the shifting fortunes of history and politics, the national celebrity that Poole achieved with The Harbor did

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Citation: Chura, Patrick. "Ernest Poole". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 December 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3597, accessed 19 March 2024.]

3597 Ernest Poole 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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