Book

Mildred Pierce

by James M. Cain · first published 1941

Mildred Pierce is a psychological hardboiled novel by James M. Cain published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1941. A story of "social inequity and opportunity in America" set during the Great Depression, Mildred Pierce follows the trajectory of a lower-middle class divorcée with two children in her tragic struggle to achieve financial and personal success. The novel is one of four major works Cain wrote featuring opera as a key component in the plot. (Serenade (1937), Career in C Major (1938) and The Moth (1948) are the others.) Mildred Pierce is Cain's first effort to write a novel in the third-person narrative form, a departure from his earlier works of the 1930s, all of them confessional narratives written in the first-person.

Summary: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0