A Rage to Live (Modern Library) - Tapa dura

Grace Caldwell Tate, the head of the leading family of Fort Penn, Pennsylvania, survives affairs, scandals, and disasters through her sheer determination

eller when it first appeared in 1949, A Rage to Live is a large-scale social chronicle of America set against the backdrop of Fort Penn, Pennsylvania, a city with a dynamic history, both public and personal. The Caldwells are its leading family, and Grace Caldwell Tate is the dramatic symbol of their dominance. Her avidity for life carries her through an impetuous childhood, marriage, violent extramarital affairs, scandal, disaster, and her own kind of triumphs. Idealists and libertines, public-spirited and self-seeking citizens, officials and tradesmen and crusaders, men of violence and goodwill, and women of fierce possessiveness and tenderness form the pageant of memorable characters who vitalize what is perhaps the most ambitious work of O'Hara's career.
   "The range of O'Hara's knowledge of how Americans live was incomparably greater than that of any other fiction writer of his time," judged The New Yorker. "One would have to go back to Frank Norris, Stephen Crane,