Rain on the Just

Download or read book Rain on the Just written by Kathleen Morehouse and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominating Rain on the Just for the 1936 Pulitzer Prize, Ray Erwin of the Char­lotte Observer wrote, “This is the finest novel produced in North Carolina in this generation, and I don’t remember any of past generations that measures up to it.” But Mrs. Morehouse was an outsider (Massachusetts), and many of her neigh­bors, affronted by the novel of “Least Dolly Allen” and the folk around Hang­ing Dog Creek, suggested “hanging Massachusetts witches.” This novel preserves the language and the folkways of the mountain natives: Least Dolly Allen, Bilow Bumgarner, Click Winkler, Trealy Sexton, Rance Drake, Tedroe Jarvis, and others. These people provide the focus of this ballad-like story set in the foothills of the Caro­lina Blue Ridge. Of Mrs. Morehouse’s power as a novelist, Edwin Granberry of the New York Sun wrote: “The reader is made to feel chagrin at his lack of charity toward the sinner, embarrass­ment at his failure to foresee the wicked­ness of the good. This is character por­trayal of a high order.”