He persisted in this experiment until 1913 when he once again returned to Richmond where he was to spend the rest of his life, except for summer holidays in the Virginia mountains and, in old age, winters spent in Saint Augustine, Florida.
In 1913 at age thirty-four, Cabell, who as a very eligible bachelor had earned a reputation as something of a libertine, married a widow with five children by her previous marriage. This woman, Rebecca Priscilla Bradley Shepherd or Priscilla Bradley, as Cabell called her, proved an ideal wife for the writer, carefully guarding his privacy, adroitly managing the practical affairs of the household, and performing with equal skill the parts of literary hostess and press agent. Cabell settled into thirty-five years of contented domesticity.
By 1919 Cabell's talent was fully mature, but his recognition by the reading public continued to grow very slowly until, on 14 January 1920, John S. Sumner, executive secretary of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice, seized the plates and all the copies of Jurgen (1919) and charged Guy Holt, Cabell's editor at McBride, with violation of the antiobscenity provisions of the New York State Penal Code.
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