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 rediscovered and newly introduced by Eudora Welty.In 1936, with the publication of his first novel, "Green Margins, "E. P. O Donnell introduced a new field for American literaturethe Delta country of Louisiana. The novel was well received critically, and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.Here, in his second noveland first comedywriting about the same country, O Donnell makes eloquent the everyday lives of a Cajun family, descendants 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 everythingbirdsyoung girlsthe Virginprobably even the barter system. It is also true comedy, and is brought about to tell us how desperate life is on Grass Margin. This comedy is filled with the antics of survival and the efforts of the Crochet family to procure a house of sufficient grandeur to match the huge doorstep which they had salvaged from the river. The Crochets continuing dream, symbolized by the doorstep, comes true at last, as all comedy must, but not without irony which gives a deeper meaning to the story."