Ernest Poole

Ernest Poole was born in Chicago in 1880 and graduated from Princeton University. He began his career as a journalist, reporting on labor strikes and social conditions, which deeply influenced his fiction. His first major success came with the novel "The Harbor" (1915), a story of labor unrest in New York. In 1918, he won the first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for "His Family," a novel about a widower navigating the changing roles of his three daughters in modern America. Poole also wrote extensively about World War I, serving as a war correspondent. Though his later works faded from prominence, his early novels remain important for their realistic portrayal of urban life and social reform. He died in 1950 in New York.