Book Description
Nominating Rain on the Just for the 1936 Pulitzer Prize, Ray Erwin of the Charlotte Observer wrote, “This is the finest novel produced in North Carolina in this generation, and I don’t remember any of past generations that measures up to it.” But Mrs. Morehouse was an outsider (Massachusetts), and many of her neighbors, affronted by the novel of “Least Dolly Allen” and the folk around Hanging Dog Creek, suggested “hanging Massachusetts witches.” This novel preserves the language and the folkways of the mountain natives: Least Dolly Allen, Bilow Bumgarner, Click Winkler, Trealy Sexton, Rance Drake, Tedroe Jarvis, and others. These people provide the focus of this ballad-like story set in the foothills of the Carolina Blue Ridge. Of Mrs. Morehouse’s power as a novelist, Edwin Granberry of the New York Sun wrote: “The reader is made to feel chagrin at his lack of charity toward the sinner, embarrassment at his failure to foresee the wickedness of the good. This is character portrayal of a high order.”
