B.F.'s Daughter: A Novel

John P. Marquand

Jul 2015 · Open Road Media

About this eBook

The daughter of a powerful industrialist seeks to live on her own terms in this entertaining portrait of the American home front during World War II

Polly Fulton, the daughter of one of America’s most successful and admired businessmen, lives with her parents and brother in a thirty-room apartment on New York City’s Park Avenue. Yet she despises the superficial trappings of wealth and delights in defying convention. In the months before America enters World War II, she shocks her family and friends by dumping her longtime boyfriend, Bob Tasmin, and marrying radical journalist Tom Brett.
 
As the war rages on the other side of the globe and dominates the thoughts of everyone at home, Polly comes to realize that she acted out of pride and contrariness, not love. But with Bob stationed in Guam, it may be too late to correct her terrible mistake.
 
A richly detailed, elegantly crafted tale about the search for happiness in the chaos of wartime, B.F.’s Daughter is one of John P. Marquand’s warmest and most empathetic novels.

About the author

John P. Marquand (1893–1960) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, proclaimed “the most successful novelist in the United States” by Life magazine in 1944. A descendant of governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, shipping magnates Daniel Marquand and Samuel Curzon, and famed nineteenth-century writer Margaret Fuller, Marquand always had one foot inside the blue-blooded New England establishment, the focus of his social satire. But he grew up on the outside, sent to live with maiden aunts in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the setting of many of his novels, after his father lost the once-considerable family fortune in the crash of 1907. From this dual perspective, Marquand crafted stories and novels that were applauded for their keen observation of cultural detail and social mores.

By the 1930s, Marquand was a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, where he debuted the character of Mr. Moto, a Japanese secret agent. No Hero, the first in a series of bestselling spy novels featuring Mr. Moto, was published in 1935. Three years later, Marquand won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Late George Apley, a subtle lampoon of Boston’s upper classes. The novels that followed, including H.M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), So Little Time (1943), B.F.’s Daughter (1946), Point of No Return (1949), Melvin Goodwin, USA (1952), Sincerely, Willis Wayde (1955), and Women and Thomas Harrow (1959), cemented his reputation as the preeminent chronicler of contemporary New England society and one of America’s finest writers.