“I wish you wanted a book about Italy and industrial conditions here for next fall instead of a sequel to _The Prestons_. You do not know how happy it makes me to learn that over 10,000 copies of _The Prestons_ have been sold since you published it in December. I am frank to confess that this is a larger sale than any other two of my books enjoyed in so short a time.
“I love _The Prestons_--all of them, even Piker, the dog, and it warms my heart in this cold Italian villa to learn that not only the American public but the critics have spoken of my book as a really fine and true interpretation of American family life. But I cannot promise the sequel to _The Prestons_.”
A month later she was yielding. She would have a sequel ready for fall, on conditions....
The truth about _The Prestons_ is this: Hardly a man or woman will be able to read it and not close the book saying to himself, “Well, the American family is a pretty good sort of an institution, after all!” No finer tribute, we venture to believe, could be paid to a book--to _any_ book.
The book was welded together from a series of short stories. Note the word, “welded.” Most novels made up of short stories are a poor patchwork. Here there was an actual fusion. The result is a novel, and nothing else.
So important is this book, so pleasant, so inspiringly hopeful in the feeling with which it leaves you, that we may justifiably disregard Mary Heaton Vorse’s other writings for the sake of concentrating on this one narrative. I can only repeat, with a slight rearranging for the sake of emphasis, what I wrote at the time of the book’s publication, which was:
Perhaps the nature of the book’s impression on the reader is due to its very inclusiveness. It really doesn’t arrive anywhere except at the end of 427 pages and of one or two years of normal American existences. No great tragedy stains its pages; there is no love story. Nothing comes to a decisive dénouement; we recall not a single “climax” except those little social climaxes which occur in the best regulated families. The only things that happen are Henry’s irritation with his twelve-year-old son, Jimmie; Jimmie’s unconquerable attempts to be allowed to do something that the grown-ups are sure to call getting into mischief; seventeen-year-old Osborn’s adventures of the heart; the changing absorptions of Edith, a high-school girl; the trials of Maria, Mrs. Preston’s unmarried sister who lives with the family, and the philosophical outgivings of Seraphy, for eighteen years the family servant and shield and friend.