putterings 470 < 471 > 472 index
sodden minds like the puttering; words of the Church. do not miss
Unquestionably Rebellion, by Joseph Medill Patterson is the book of the year. It is the great American novel come at last, a vivid, realistic story of the lives of thousands of working men and women in every large city in this country. The characters are people we know. Georgia Connors, the wife of a chronic inebriate, becomes a stenographer, to support her mother, her brother and her husband. When her yearning for decent living overcomes the teachings of the Catholic Church of which she is a member, she separates from Connors, and at last she learns what the love of a real man may be to a woman. Then begins the age-long struggle between the standards of life acquired in The Loop and the Catholic Church. During a period of illness the priest persuades her to take back Jim Connors, who has given up drinking. A baby is born to them, but it lives only a few weeks owing to the heritage of disease bequeathed by its father who has again succumbed to his craving for whisky. At the grave of their child, Georgia Connors separates from her husband for the second time. A year later Mason Stevens, the man for whom she has long cared, returns and the priest meets the modern materialist with the century old precepts of the Catholic Church. Georgia declares she will secure an absolute divorce and marry Stevens.
The characters are drawn with an artistic touch that is a revelation. We all know young boys like Al, Georgia’s brother, who is ready to fight for his sister’s honor, pathetic sodden minds like the puttering, ineffective mother’s, who accept blindly the words of the Church. Do not miss this book. It is realistic, common, stimulating and full of the problems of the working man and woman. Its art lies in its very simplicity, and every character stands out as true to life as life itself. We have not yet done wondering that such a work could come from the pen of a Little Brother of the Rich.
— review of Joseph Medill Patterson, Rebellion (1911) in
The International Socialist Review (“Of, by, and for the working class,” Charles H. Kerr, ed.) 12:11 (May 1912) : 783
Cornell copy/scan (via google books) : link
same (Cornell) copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
Joseph Medill Patterson (1879-1946), born to wealth, writer, publisher
wikipedia : link
writings via hathitrust : link
among which —
- Joseph Medill Patterson, A Little Brother of the Rich. Illustrations by Hazel Martyn Trudeau (1880-1935 *) and Walter Dean Goldbeck (1882-1925 *) (Chicago, 1908)
U California copy/scan (one of several via hathitrust) : link - Joseph Medill Patterson, Rebellion. Illustrated by Walter Dean Goldbeck (Chicago, 1911)
NYPL copy/scan (one of several, via hathitrust) : link
“Peccavi”
frontispiece illustration by Walter Dean Goldbeck, Rebellion
“Although his writing was almost uniformly antiestablishment, Joe’s core attitudes sometimes fluctuated...”
— Megan McKinney, The magnificent Medills : America’s royal family of journalism during a century of turbulent splendor (2011) : 110
borrowable via archive.org : link