RAIN ON THE JUST Kathleen Morehouse Signed 2x Inscribed with Ecclesiastes

Kathleen Morehouse • Rain on the Just

Southern Illinois University Press, 1980; reprint of the 1936 edition published by L. Furman. Hardcover. 333 pp. Gray boards with soft blue stamped title to spine.

Signed twice by the author. First to front free endpaper underneath her inscription: "Ecclesiastes I : 5 The sun also ariseth." Dated April 2, 1980. Secondly to the title page.

Good+ Firm and tight. Slightly spine cocked. Mild rubbing to boards and corners. Toning to endpapers, with a Kay's Gifts (Wilkesboro, NC) sticker affixed to the front pastedown. Internal pages are clean and free of markings. Dust jacket shows moderate wear, chipping at top spine, top & bottom edge rear panel.
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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."