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Celebrated by writers including Jonathan Franzen, who said that "[t]his crazy, gorgeous family novel is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century,"
The Man Who Loved Children is a 1940 novel by Australian writer Christina Stead. The harrowing portrait of a dysfunctional family, the novel focuses on the relationship between the father, Sam, a tyrannical crank far removed from the civilized man he thinks himself to be, his bitter wife, Henny, and their six children, particularly eldest daughter, Louie. Considering a contemporary classic,
The Man Who Loved Children was named one of the the 100 greatest novels of all time by
Time magazine.
In her entry in Ig's acclaimed Bookmarked series, author Lucy Ferriss juxtaposes the egoism and brutality of Sam with the behavior of her own father, using his dairies to give the reader an intimate and devastating portrait of their father-daughter relationship. Ferriss also shares how
The Man Who Loved Children influenced her own creativity and development as a writer, as well as taking on male critics of the novel-including Franzen-to get to the true feminist heart of what
Time called "the greatest picture of the lousiest family of all time."
About the author
Lucy Ferriss's fiction collection,
Foreign
Climes, won the Brighthorse Books Award in 2021. Her most
recent novel is
A Sister to Honor (Penguin, 2015). Her 2012 book,
The Lost
Daughter, was a Book-of-the-Month pick, while her memoir,
Unveiling the Prophet, was named Best
Book of the Year by the
Riverfront Times. Her short fiction and essays have
appeared in
The American Scholar, December, Missouri Review,
Crazyhorse, and
Novel Slices and have received recognition from the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Faulkner Society, the Fulbright
Commission, and the International Society for Narrative, among others. Lucy received her Ph.D. from Tufts University and lives with her husband in the Berkshires and in Connecticut, where she is Writer-in-Residence Emerita
at Trinity College.
