Rain on the Just

Nominating Rain on the Just for the 1936 Pulitzer Prize, Ray Erwin of the Char­lotte Observer wrote, “This is the finest novel produced in North Carolina in this generation, and I don’t remember any of past generations that measures up to it.” But Mrs. Morehouse was an outsider (Massachusetts), and many of her neigh­bors, affronted by the novel of “Least Dolly Allen” and the folk around Hang­ing Dog Creek, suggested “hanging Massachusetts witches.”   This novel preserves the language and the folkways of the mountain natives: Least Dolly Allen, Bilow Bumgarner, Click Winkler, Trealy Sexton, Rance Drake, Tedroe Jarvis, and others. These people provide the focus of this ballad-like story set in the foothills of the Caro­lina Blue Ridge. Of Mrs. Morehouse’s power as a novelist, Edwin Granberry of the New York Sun wrote: “The reader is made to feel chagrin at his lack of charity toward the sinner, embarrass­ment at his failure to foresee the wicked­ness of the good. This is character por­trayal of a high order.”