The Avalanche

by Ernest Poole

This is the love story of Llewellyn Door, a brilliant young neurologist, and Dorothea Farragut, a New York society girl who resolves when she accepts him to launch him on a great career. It is a story not only of love but of a man's increasing power over unknown psychic forces. Far behind it the reader feels Llewellyn's sensitive childhood, his sense of the vast mystic life of the mountain he loved as a small boy. And the story has as its background that whole mysterious psychic field on whose new frontier he is working "to push his little circle of light farther out into the dark."

In a tale of their year of married life Mr. Poole presents with power the clash of the man's ideals and the woman's ambitions for him– the avalanche of success that overwhelmed their love.

(from dust jacket inside flap)

350 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1924

About the author

Ernest Poole graduated from Princeton University in 1902. He worked as a journalist and was active in promoting social reforms including the ending of child labor He was a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post in Europe before and during World War I.

His novel The Harbor (1915) is the work for which he is known best.It is set largely among the proletariat of the industrial Brooklyn waterfront, and is sympathetic with socialism. It is considered one of the first American fictional works to present a positive opinion of trade unions.

Poole was the first recipient for the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1918 with his novel, His Family.
He died in Manhattan, New York on January 10, 1950.