author
Margaret Wilson
1882–1973
Best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Able McLaughlins, this American writer drew on frontier life, faith, and family conflict to create vivid historical fiction. Her work often explored strong-willed characters facing hard choices in close-knit communities.
2 Audiobooks
The painted room
by Margaret Wilson
The Able McLaughlins
by Margaret Wilson
About the author
Born in Traer, Iowa, in 1882, Margaret Wilhelmina Wilson grew up in a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian farming community that later shaped the world of her fiction. She studied at the University of Chicago, then spent several years in India as a Presbyterian missionary before turning to writing.
Wilson's first novel, The Able McLaughlins (1923), won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize and remains the book she is most remembered for. She went on to write more novels, short stories, and other works, often drawing on rural life, religion, and the emotional strains within families and communities.
She spent much of her later life in England and died in Droitwich, Worcestershire, in 1973. Though not as widely read now as some of her contemporaries, she holds an important place in American literary history as an early Pulitzer-winning novelist.