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The Harbor
Ernest Poole
Book Overview:
The Harbor is a fictional account of life on a Brooklyn waterfront through the eyes of Billy as he is growing up. The novel starts with Billy the child, living on the harbor with his father, mother, and sister, Sue. During this time he also meets Eleanor who, at that time, he considers to be strange. She later becomes an important character in the novel. His father owns a shipping business, is hard-working, and can think of little else. As a young man, Billy begins to detest the harbor and longs for escape to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a writer and avoiding his father’s business. With his mother’s blessing, he takes flight to Paris to hone his trade. While in Paris, he meets Joe Kramer (J.K.) and a sometimes stormy relationship begins. J.K. forces him to confront human situations that Billy would prefer to close his eyes to. Billy eventually returns to the harbor after some years and recognizes changes are taking place in the harbor, and in his life. The harbor becomes a subject for his writing and his personal relationships. His attitude about the harbor begins to evolve. Throughout the novel, J.K. continues to make appearances in Billy’s life, challenging him to write about things as they really are and not as Billy’s world of comfort shows them to be. Billy’s life is changed when the harbor goes on strike and he becomes involved in the labor movement. What more can be said about a book that starts with the words, “You Chump!”?
The Harbor is a fictional account of life on a Brooklyn waterfront through the eyes of Billy as he is growing up. The novel starts with Billy the child, living on the harbor with his father, mother, and sister, Sue. During this time he also meets Eleanor who, at that time, he considers to be strange. She later becomes an important character in the novel. His father owns a shipping business, is hard-working, and can think of little else. As a young man, Billy begins to detest the harbor and longs for escape to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a writer and avoiding his father’s business. With his mother’s blessing, he takes flight to Paris to hone his trade. While in Paris, he meets Joe Kramer (J.K.) and a sometimes stormy relationship begins. J.K. forces him to confront human situations that Billy would prefer to close his eyes to. Billy eventually returns to the harbor after some years and recognizes changes are taking place in the harbor, and in his life. The harbor becomes a subject for his writing and his personal relationships. His attitude about the harbor begins to evolve. Throughout the novel, J.K. continues to make appearances in Billy’s life, challenging him to write about things as they really are and not as Billy’s world of comfort shows them to be. Billy’s life is changed when the harbor goes on strike and he becomes involved in the labor movement. What more can be said about a book that starts with the words, “You Chump!”?
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I found Sue waiting on the dock, and I saw with a little shock of surprise that my young sister was grown up. I had never noticed her much before. Sue and I had never got on from the start. She had been my father's chum and I had been my mother's. I had always felt her mocking smile toward me and all my solemn thoughts. And after that small catastrophe which I had had with Eleanore, I had more than ever avoided Sue and her girl friends. Then I had gone to college, and each time that I came home she had seemed to me all arms and legs, fool secrets and fool giggles—a most uninteresting kid. I remember being distinctly surprised when I brought Joe home for Christmas to find that he thought her quite a girl. But now she was all different. She had grown tall and graceful, lithe, and in her suit of mourning she looked so much older, her face thin and worn, subdued and softened by all she'd been through.. . . Read More
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Community Reviews
great until he became a revolutionary tract
Poole knows a lot about people… but from the trenches of the labor movement of the twenties he couldn’t see that reforms would happen without complete smash up of society as we know it- he became lost in the thickets he strains so hard to get out above
I hadn’t known of this author until I read his Pulitzer Prize winner ‘His Family’ which I liked a lot. Having now read this one, I actually think this is the better book. Both are very much of their time - the attitudes, mores and norms were so different to today, but both books reflect that period
“The Harbor” is Ernest Poole’s best known work, although his later work, “His Family”, would be the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1918. “The Harbor was published in 1915, and the novel is among the first, if not the first, to present labor unions in a positive light. Though certainly a gr
An interesting read, looking back at this contemporary novel from over a hundred years in the future. For some reason I never thought about how steam ships were physically powered, the description in the book is amazing and also hellish. I really felt the times come alive through the writing, includ
I was assigned this book as part of a Modernist literature class at the University of Akron and I was quite surprised on how much I liked it. Many assigned novels are usually interesting but I wouldn't say that I read them for pleasure. This book was different and I enjoyed it a lot. Especially the
So boring. I read most of it and discovered that I really don't care how it ends.
Ernest Poole won the very first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1918 for his novel His Family, but within the literary circle it is commonly agreed that the award was for his 1915 novel the Harbor, which was published before the award came to existence.
The harbor told the story of Bill who grew up in
The Harbor was labeled a "socialist novel," a label I think may have been most accurate upon the book's release in 1915. Today, with society's acceptance of labor unions and with unions' coexistence with standard employment practices in the U.S., perhaps the book is better thought of as a general "c
Ernest Poole won the first ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1918 for His Family, but it was his novel of three years earlier, The Harbor, that remains his most lasting work. It's the story of a journalist named Billy (surely based on Poole himself), who grows up in a comfortable middle class house