Great Big Doorstep

E. P. O'Donnell, Bryan Giemza, Eudora Welty

First published by Houghton Mifflin in October 1941, just a few months before America?s entry into World War II swept the nation?s attention from the appearance of new fiction, this second novel by a writer of exceptional promise, who died two years later, is here redisƯcovered and newly introduced by Eudora Welty. In 1936, with the publication of his first novel, Green Margins, E. P. O?DonƯnell introduced a new field for American literature?the Delta country of LouisiƯana. The novel was well received criticalƯly, and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Here, in his second novel?and first comedy?writing about the same counƯtry, O?Donnell makes eloquent the everyday lives of a Cajun family, deƯscendants of the original Acadians, whose world is the Mississippi?s mouth, and, in fact, their lives. ?It is a scene,? Eudora Welty writes, ?which takes for granted the misuse of...