Shirley Ann Grau, for me is right now the American equivalent of Gwethalyn Graham(remember that Canadian author that I love, that wrote about the Swiss boarding school and the Jewish man and WASPy woman falling in love during WWII?). Grau (b.1929), who is still alive, writes of the DEEP South, with what, at times in The Keepers of the House, seems to be some scalding truth. Keepers, which won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1965,(even though the front of the copy that I borrowed from the library says it won the PP in 1964, that's a typo. No award was given in 1964.) tells the story of a wealthy Southern aristocrat(in the sense of coming from OLD money, Reconstructionist money at that)who meets a young black woman, hires her to be his housekeeper and then fathers 3 children with her and creates a 30 year "marriage" of sorts with her. She is his best friend, companion, lover, his equal in his eyes, though not of course in the eyes of anyone else. He does all of this in the early to middle of last century, when segregationist tendencies(like the Klan) are just starting to come to a head. Nobody really cares that much, I mean, people talk of course, but since he is by far the wealthiest man in the area, and powerful because of it, people just leave him and his "mistress" alone. The children are sent away to the North to be educated in boarding schools because they can "pass for white" there, since apparently Northerners are not looking as hard to see if they can find "Negro" blood in people as born and bred Southerners do. Through the eyes of the main character, the aristocrat's legitimate(and pure White)grand-daughter, we see a South that is not integrated but averts its eyes to things that may not be completely "kosher" as it were. Everything seems to go okay, even after the death of Abigail(the protagonist and narrator)'s grandfather, until one of the aristocrat's illegitimate children goes to the press about the truth in his parents' relationship because he is upset to be out of his late mother's will and also because he has read about Abigail's husband, an up-and-coming politician, and the distasteful things he has said about black people. He is angry and he is out to destroy. It is his will that changes the course of everyone's life: Abigail, her husband, the children of William Howland(her grandfather) and even the townspeople of Madison City where William owned so much land. What he reveals is that his father, this white Southern aristocrat, MARRIED his mother, a black woman, and gave his children his name. This Southerner did the right thing, he married the woman he loved, and provided her with a home and provided for THEIR children. When the townspeople find this out(and when Abigail's husband finds this out), it's a big FUCKING problem. The South at that time was full of Klansmen and not ready for something like that. And on the eve of possibly having the first Black candidate for President(or at least the first real possibility of one), who knows if the South and the rest of the nation for that matter are ready for true integration. Grau's book is amazing for what it tackles and how it does it, especially for the fact that it won the Pulitzer at a time when the civil rights movement was just getting really underway and the South was still full of such unspeakable civil rights violations. Grau does not offer any solutions, she doesn't even make the characters into martyrs for a cause, she makes them real people who live in a real time, who are tackling with the world in which they live and what that feels like. It was an impressive feat. (On a somewhat irrelevant note, I found it interesting that she mentions the Huey Long in Louisiana as someone who Abigail's husband, John Tolliver, looks up to, when a fictionalized Long is the subject of Warren's All the King's Men, a great novel of the CORRUPTION in politics, etc.). What was interesting to me in reading Grau's novel, though, is that when people asked me what I was reading today, when I went out to coffee with Keren and some of her grad school friends(they were grading papers, I was reading), is that NO ONE knew Shirley Ann Grau's name, nor had they heard of the book at all. The Pulitzer awards to authors who write a novel that deals with an aspect of American life, and surely interracial marriage, amongst the other themes in this book, is an aspect of American life that one should write novels about, and the novels should be read, like this one should. This brings me back to my original statement, why I think Grau is the American version of Gwethalyn Graham. Graham wrote at least two(I've only read two) ROCKSTAR novels, but no one today even knows about them, novels about desire for social justice and change and just dead-on portrayals of her time. Grau also wrote an incredible novel, that deserves recognition beyond the Pulitzer it won more than 40 years ago. It brings me back to my eternal question...how does a society pick what is considered timeless and cast aside other works? If it was up to me, this book would have a revival.:) PPs-40!!, GGs-35!!!