Colcorton is Pope’s most acclaimed and honored work. It was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 (losing to John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano) and received glowing reviews

The Colcorton estate has fallen on hard times. The wind blows through its paneless windows, and the front porch has been sold for lumber to pay school fees. Its lone heirs, Abby and Jared Clanghearne, are orphans, left without the wherewithal to even think about keeping up appearances. Abby, fifteen years old when her father dies, has dreams of restoring the family:

She has scrimped and saved to put Jared through college and law school, and he has landed a job with a law firm in St. Augustine – she sees his future as a state senator. But Jared returns from Tallahassee madly in love and married to a child-bride, Beth, another orphan, who has eloped from an unhappy family situation in Alabama.
Abby’s worst fears come to haunt her. Jared goes to Tallahassee to research a deed for a family friend and returns a changed man. He turns to gambling and drink. When Beth tells Jared of her pregnancy, he becomes even more despondent. Jared’s change of character comes as a result of his discovery of his true identity -- it’s a secret that Abby has kept from Jared all his life, and now Jared keeps his knowledge a secret from Abby – and it is within this toxic secret of race in the Jim Crow society of early twentieth-century Florida that tragedy arises. ( )

Paperback pulp reprint of Colcorton