The Able McLaughlins

A Library of America eBook Classic

The riveting Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, available as an e-book for the first time.

Wully McLaughlin returns to his family’s Iowa homestead at the end of the Civil War to find his sweetheart, Chirstie McNair, alone and in distress, her mother dead and her wayward father gone. Perplexed by a new aloofness in Chirstie, Wully soon discovers that she has been raped and is pregnant. To the shock of his parents and the tight-knit Scottish community in which they live, he marries Chirstie and claims the child, and the shame of its early birth, as his own. But the lingering presence of Chirstie’s attacker sets in motion a series of events that pit the desire for revenge against a reluctance to perpetuate the cycle of violence.
 
Often compared to Willa Cather’s One of Ours and Edna Ferber’s So Big for its earthy realism, its portrait of an immigrant community, and its depiction of Midwestern farm life, Margaret Wilson’s provocative debut novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 1924, is ripe for rediscovery. In a recent reappraisal Judy Cornes commends the novel’s “feeling for time and place: a sense of the unrelenting forces that both history and nature impose on the individual. . . . The Able McLaughlins remains an engrossing story with characters who constantly engage our attention.”