Margaret Ayer Barnes, best known as a novelist of manners, who depicted the upper middle class as it was in the years of the 1890s through the 1930s, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for her first novel, Years of Grace (1930). Though not a feminist nor a regionalist, she created female protagonists of Chicago backgrounds who strive to uphold the morality and conventions of their upbringing in a society that flaunts new sexual carelessness and diminishes the status and power that women enjoyed in traditional roles. The young woman entering college or marriage at the turn of the century can never achieve the authority Barnes's typical protagonist remembers ascribing to her own mother, especially not in matters of selecting proper mates for her children or advising the young parents on the rearing of her grandchildren And, though Years of Grace upholds that aspect of the American dream in which...