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Ernest Poole
1880–1950
A journalist-novelist who brought the upheavals of early 20th-century America and Russia to life, he became the first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His work mixes on-the-ground reporting with a strong interest in ordinary people caught inside major social change.
3 Audiobooks
About the author
Born in 1880, Ernest Poole was an American journalist, novelist, and playwright whose career moved between investigative reporting and socially engaged fiction. He is especially remembered for his firsthand writing on revolutionary Russia and for novels that explored labor, industry, and class in the United States.
Poole won the very first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for His Family in 1918, a novel centered on family life in New York as the modern city rapidly changed around it. Alongside his fiction, he wrote reportage and commentary shaped by his interest in reform politics and the lives of working people.
Today, he is often read as a bridge between muckraking journalism and early 20th-century literary realism: a writer drawn to big historical forces, but just as interested in how those forces reshape daily life.