First published by Houghton Mifflin in October 1941, just a few months before America’s entry into World War II swept the nation’s attention from the appearance of new fiction, this second novel by a writer of exceptional promise, who died two years later, is here redis-covered and newly introduced by Eudora Welty. In 1936, with the publication of his first novel, Green Margins, E. P. O’Don-nell introduced a new field for American literature–the Delta country of Louisi-ana. The novel was well received critical-ly, and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Here, in his second novel–and first comedy–writing about the same coun-try, O’Donnell makes eloquent the everyday lives of a Cajun family, de-scendants of the original Acadians, whose world is the Mississippi’s mouth, and, in fact, their lives. “It is a scene,” Eudora Welty writes, “which takes for granted the misuse of everything–birds–young girls–the Virgin–probably even the barter system. It is also true comedy, and is brought about to tell us how desperate life is on Grass Margin.” This comedy is filled with the antics of survival and the efforts of the Crochet family to procure a house of sufficient grandeur to match the huge doorstep which they had salvaged from the river. The Crochets’ continuing dream, sym-bolized by the doorstep, comes true at last, as all comedy must, but not with-out irony which gives a deeper meaning to the story.

The Great Big Doorstep (Lost American Fiction) PDF

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