Shadow on the Hearth
Doubleday Books | |
Publication date | 1950 |
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Media type | Print (Hardback) |
Pages | 277 |
Shadow on the Hearth is a
Shadow on the Hearth tells the story of "a Westchester woman and her two children after the explosion of a series of atomic bombs on New York".[2] Merril described it as "a very political novel, ... written for political reasons".[3]
Merril began writing Shadow on the Hearth as a short story; "When it reached ten thousand words," she remembered, "I began to understand that it wanted to be a novel." Although she stopped working on the piece when it reached twice that length, needing to spend more time with her young daughter, Doubleday editor Walter I. Bradbury read the incomplete draft and bought the novel. Merril quit her editorial job at Bantam to complete it. When she completed it, Doubleday imposed its own title (avoiding any mention of nuclear war), revising the text to create a happier ending, and wrapping the novel in a nondescript dust jacket. "On the cover was an attractive young mother, obviously in great distress: it could have been a gothic novel", Merril later groused, "or basically anything".[3]
In 1954, the
Reception
Genre reviewers viewed Merril's effort more favorably.
More recent reviewers also rate the novel highly. Lisa Yaszek writes that Shadow on the Hearth "is one of the only postwar holocaust narratives that manages to work its way out from under the paralyzing shadow of the mushroom cloud and to imagine the possibility of women -- and men -- working together to build a more peaceful and rational future".[12] Judith Merril: A Critical Study notes that "contemporary critics respect Merril's novel for its originality in domesticating nuclear attack -- hence the story's power and darkness".[13] David Seed reports the novel is "universally praised . . . for its understated method, avoidance of melodrama and unusually oblique description of nuclear attack".[14] M. Keith Booker declares that Shadow on the Hearth is "a relatively daring novel" and "a useful corrective to the heroic vision of post apocalypse life".[15]
References
- ^ ISFDB publication history
- ^ "Books -- Authors", The New York Times, June 10, 1950
- ^ a b c Judith Merril & Emily Pohl-Weary, Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, Between The Lines, 2002, pp. 97-99.
- ^ "Books of the Times", The New York Times, June 15, 1950.
- ^ "No Hiroshima", The New York Times Book Review, June 18, 1950
- ^ "Galaxy's Five Star Shelf", Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1950, p. 141.
- F&SF, December 1950, p. 104.
- Astounding Science Fiction. March 1951, p. 145.
- ^ "Science Fiction Bookshelf", Startling Stories, November 1950, p.160
- ^ "Something to Read", Nebula, February 1954, p.125
- ^ "From the Bookshelf", Future, November 1950, p.98
- ^ "Not Lost in Space: Revising the Politics of Cold War Womanhood in Judith Merril's Science Fiction", in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction, Donald M. Hassler & Clyde Wilcox, eds., University of South Carolina Press, 2008, p.83
- ^ Dianne Newell & Victoria Lamont, Judith Merril: A Critical Study, McFarland, 2012, p.35
- ^ American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film, Routledge, 2013, p.57
- ^ Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964, Greenwood Publishing, 2001, p.70
External links
- The Motorola TV Theatre Atomic Attack on Archive.org