Margaret Ayer Barnes

Biography

Margaret Ayer Barnes (1886–1967) was an American novelist and playwright who became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (1931) for Years of Grace. Born in Chicago to a prominent family, Barnes graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1907 and married Cecil Barnes, a lawyer, with whom she had three sons. A serious car accident in France in 1926 left her bedridden for months, during which she began writing fiction. Her first literary efforts were plays, collaborating with Edward Sheldon on adaptations including Jenny (1929) and Dishonored Lady (1930). Her debut novel, Years of Grace (1930), drew on her intimate knowledge of Chicago’s upper-middle-class society to trace three decades in the life of a woman navigating changing social mores. The Pulitzer Prize brought immediate fame. Barnes followed with Westward Passage (1931), adapted into a film starring Ann Harding, and Within This Present (1933), a Depression-era novel. Her fiction is characterized by careful social observation, sympathy for women constrained by convention, and detailed portraits of American domestic life during a period of rapid social change.