The Keepers of the House - Hardcover

Shirley Ann Grau

4

12,685 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394431820 ISBN 13: 9780394431826

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964

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The relationship between Will Howland and his Negro mistress is exposed when their grandaughter marries a segregationist with political ambitions

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From the Back Cover:

"Each year, I reread three authors--Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Shirley Ann Grau. No one else writes about the landscape of Louisiana as she does, but also about the landscape of bitter love and family dreams, of sex not as romance but as commerce and experiment and mystery, of people adrift in their lives and people so tethered to their own pieces of earth. Keepers of the House is a masterpiece of history and race and the fragile yet tenuous ownership of land and love."
--Susan Straight, author of the National Book Award Finalist Highwire Moon

“A beautifully written book.”--Atlantic Monthly

“Her best novel.”--Saturday Review

“Shirley Ann Grau is one of those rare writers who creates a world, draws the reader into it, and makes him somehow happy there no matter what goes on....Such is her beguilement that one comes to the novel’s end with a sense of loss and leaves that world with reluctance.” --Newsweek

From the Inside Flap:

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1965, The Keepers of the House" is Shirley Ann Grau's masterwork, a many-layered indictment of racism and rage that is as terrifying as it is wise.
Entrenched on the same land since the early 1800s, the Howlands have, for seven generations, been pillars of their Southern community. Extraordinary family lore has been passed down to Abigail Howland, but not all of it. When shocking facts come to light about her late grandfather William's relationship with Margaret Carmichael, a black housekeeper, the community is outraged, and quickly gathers to vent its fury on Abigail. Alone in the house the Howlands built, she is at once shaken by those who have betrayed her, and determined to punish the town that has persecuted her and her kin.
Morally intricate, graceful and suspenseful, The Keepers of the House has become a modern classic.

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