Ernest Poole

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Ernest Cook Poole (January 23, 1880 to January 10, 1950) was an American journalist, novelist, and playwright.

During and immediately after the 1917 revolution and Revolution as a popular writer of pro-teed fiction during World War I and the 1920s, Poole is best known for his sympathetic first-hand coverage of revolutionary Russia during and immediately after the 1917 revolution and Civil War I and II. In 1918, Poole received the first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his book, His Family.

Early years

Ernest Cook Poole was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 23, 1880, to Abram Poole and Mary Howe Poole. His Wisconsin-born father was a successful commodities trader for the Chicago Board of Trade, and his mother came from a well-established Chicago family; together, they raised 7 children.

Poole was educated at home until he was almost seven years old, when he enrolled in the University School for Boys in Chicago. He first demonstrated a penchant for writing while working on the staff of the school newspaper for a short time. He was a wealthy youth who spent the summers at his grandparents' seasonal home in Lake Forest, Michigan's shores. The family's Michigan Avenue home in Chicago was populated with servants, including gardeners and governesses, and he grew up in Chicago's proximity to the city's scions, including young cousins of Cyrus McCormick and Abraham Lincoln.

Poole, a talented violinist, took a year off to study music with the intention of becoming a professional composer following high school graduation. He found writing music difficult, but the writer — inspired by his literary-oriented and story-telling father — turned his attention to the written word as a viable field.

Poole moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he took political science courses taught by Woodrow Wilson after a year-long exile from formal education. He continued to express an interest in journalism and fiction writing while on the staff of the school's daily newspaper, The Prince, before finding straight journalism tedious. He went from nuts-and-bolts journalism to the arts, contributing to the campus literary journal, The Lit, and creating two librettos for Princeton's illustrious Princeton Triangle Club, but both were turned down.

Poole was introduced to the concepts of progressive reform associated with the burgeoning muckraker movement at Princeton, with Jacob Riis' book How The Other Half Lives playing a vital role in Poole's cultural evolution. He also read translations of Russian classics by Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, who both wowed Poole for their realistic style and sparked what could be a lifelong interest in him in the authors' homeland.

Poole graduated from Princeton cum laude in 1902 and then migrated to New York City to live in the University Settlement House on the city's impoverished Lower East Side. Poole earned the attention of editors at McClure's Magazine for an article he wrote about the current child labor issue in New York's Chinatown district during his time as a settlement employee.

Poole wrote an article that, in 1903, found its way into McClure's fledgling muckraking magazine, being pressed by the Child Labor Committee to seek out attention by rewriting some of his lurid anecdotes of street urchins' lives. Payment for the freelance project was received, and confidence was boosted. Poole's life, as well as that of a professional writer, had begun.

Poole, a headstrong and confident, plunged into his passion, fantasy, while still being ensconced as a settlement employee. Three short stories were immediately submitted and sent out to various New York journals, only to be left with letters of rejection. Poole retreated to writing short works of investigative journalism on the boys of the city streets, and had greater success, with one piece in Collier's and two others in the New York Evening Post.

During the day, Poole's settlement house was bustling with active teaching classes and housing club groups. It welcomed a steady stream of visitors in the evenings, including social worker Jane Addams, journalist Lincoln Steffens, British author H. G. Wells, and left-wing political figures Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, as well as renowned lawyer Clarence Darrow. Poole introduced acquaintances and theories, and the desire to correct society's shortcomings by advancing in the quest for social reform through intelligent social change was reinforced.

Poole set about discovering Yiddish, eavesdropping on discussions and jotting down fragments of the dialogue he heard for future use in his imaginative writing, an eager to learn more about the people of the crowded Lower East Side environment in which he lived. He met and made friends with Abraham Cahan, the creator of the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward (Der Forverts), and learned a great deal from the venerable defender of Russia's Tsarist autocracy.

As he was selected to look at tuberculosis in New York City's Lower East Side tenement slums, the 23-year-old Poole's as a settlement employee was on point. Observing and surveying people and giving testimony about the former inhabitants of the house of Commons went from room to room for weeks. The publication, "The Plague in Its Stronghold," attracted the attention of journalists and photographers around the tenement blocks, with the news fueling hearings of the New York State Legislature in Albany. The job put a strain on Poole's mental and physical health, and he became ill, and he was sent home to the family's summer home in Lake Forest to recover.

As a result of Poole's time as a settlement employee, he turned to investigative journalism. The Outlook published a story in 1904 in which Poole was sent to live for six weeks in Chicago's packinghouse district to report on the raging stockyards' revolt, which featured a slew of striking new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe against thousands of African-American strikebreakers brought for the purpose to the city.

Poole stayed on the scene as the volunteer press agent for the fighting slaughterhouse workers until his Outlook piece was completed. The job put him in touch with young Upton Sinclair, who was on the scene to do research for what he hoped to become the "Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Labor Movement," first published in 1906 as The Jungle. In 1905, Poole's closest friends in New York included two others who would travel to Imperial Russia as reporters, including Arthur Bullard and William English Walling.

Poole returned to New York with the so-called "Little Grandmother of the Revolution," Yekaterina Breshkovskya, an émigré Russian revolutionary. Poole stayed for eight hours with an interpreter and a stenographer, as a result of the Romanov dynasty of Imperial Russia's struggle for deposed Romanov dynasty. Poole's interview would result in the publication of a pamphlet by Chicago socialist publishing house Charles H. Kerr & Co., entitled "For Russia's Independence."

Poole, frightened by Russia's turbulent political situation, persuaded The Outlook to send him to Russia as the magazine's reporter and a deal was drawn up. Poole sailed for England, then proceeded to France before heading to Berlin and onto Russia, carrying with him communications and funds entrusted to him in Paris for underground Russian constitutionalists. Poole and a translator spent time in Russia in the early days of the 1905 Revolution, eventually turning in 14 pieces to The Outlook detailing his experiences and observations.

Poole continued to write feature short stories depicting urban working class life for the periodical press, while still gathering anecdotes for future novels. As a prolific freelance writer, Poole divided his time between The Saturday Evening Post and Everybody's Magazine.

Poole married Margaret Ann Witherbotham in 1907, and the couple established a house in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. The couple will have three children.

Poole rediscovered writing of plays for the stage, an offshoot of the writing craft that had stifled the chance of earning significant financial rewards if a piece was successfully staged for several years. His first attempt, revolved around a steel mill's life, failed to locate a designer, but his second, a drama about the construction of a bridge in the Rocky Mountains, culminated in six weeks of rehearsals and a close, followed by poor reviews and a quick close.

Poole would write 11 plays for the New York stage, two of which in collaboration with Harriet Ford. With the two highly acclaimed dramas running for six weeks and three months respectively, a total of three of Poole's attempts will be staged. Poole would return to more dependable forms of writing if his desire to write for the stage.

Poole was slow to join the growing Socialist Party of America (SPA), initially refusing to join because he later remembered that he had "got free from one church and didn't write propaganda all my life rather than the truth as I saw it and felt it." Around 1908, he made friends with party leader Morris Hillquit, but later told the non-Marxist Poole that his views fell within the Socialist Party's "very broad and liberal" ideological umbrella. Poole earned his red card with the company from the start of World War I.

Poole started writing for the New York Call, a radical daily closely affiliated with the Socialist Party of America, since 1908. (SPA) Poole was also one of the few left-wing intellectuals who helped found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS), participating in the challenge with his colleagues Arthur Bullard and Charles Edward Russell.

Poole started to concentrate on long fiction after leaving the stage. He began investigating on the waterfront areas of Brooklyn Heights, New York, gathering observations and anecdotes that he'd painstakingly prepare for the first of his major books, The Harbor, which was published by Macmillan in 1912. Poole spent two months in Europe before returning to the family's new home in the White Mountains of New Hampshire to begin writing his next book.

When World War I broke out across Europe in the summer of 1914, this idyllic interlude was shattered. Poole recovered the manuscript for his Macmillans book and spent a month writing a new ending because the world situation has so drastically changed. Poole was hired to cover the Paris and England war as if a moth to a flame, but found that all the positions for correspondents had been filled. However, he was able to convince The Saturday Evening Post to cover the conflict from the opposite camp, and he sailed aboard a British ship for Europe early in November 1914.

He viewed German hospitals, troop trains, and saw the front from the German side in Germany, as part of other western war correspondents such as Jack Reed. He will be spending three months in Europe reporting the war.

The Harbor, Poole's 1915 debut, was well-received by critics and the reading public, and his place in the American literary scene was firmly established. He set the book down with a new one in 1917 dealing with intergenerational conflict, called His Families. This book was also highly regarded, earning Poole the first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1918, which at least one 21st century literary critic has said was given to Poole as much for his previous effort, The Harbor."

In the first two years, Poole's second book attempted to build on the success of His Family's second book, His Second Wife, which was published in serial form in McClure's before being published in hardcovers later in 1918. This book was notably less successful than his previous literary experiments with writers and the general public, but Poole's fiction never gained such acclaim again.

Poole produced works of fiction for Macmillan from 1920 to 1934 at a rate of about one per year. Although none of these memoirs met with critical acclaim, Poole's wartime memoirs, the 1927 book Silent Storms received some measure of public recognition.

In 1917, The Evening Post sent Poole to Russia to cover the Russian Revolution, where he collaborated with other sympathetic American commentators, including John "Jack" Reed and Louise Bryant. His reporting on Russia's volatile world was closely followed by a curious public, and the journals followed him with raw material for two works of non-fiction, "The Dark People": Russian Politics and The Village: Russian Impressions, both of which were released in book form by Macmillan in 1918.

Poole, Paul Kennaday, and Arthur Livingston founded the Foreign Press Service, an international author representation company that negotiated for foreign writers with English-language publishers after the war.

Poole wrote The Bridge: My Own Story in 1940, after a six-year absence with Macmillan. He returned to writing books during the last decade of his life, releasing one book of non-fiction about influential figures in Chicago history and two less popular authors.

Ernest Poole died of pneumonia in New York City on Tuesday, January 10, 1950, just thirteen days away from his 70th birthday.

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