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.
"The unhappy plight of the multimillionaire's daughter may seem too worn a theme for mature consideration. But Mr. Marquand has made it seem fresh and significant again."
The New York Times
"B.F.'s Daughter is another major Marquand product. . . . Always entertaining . . . Mr. Marquand has not yet made up his mind about the American rich and their place in tomorrow's cosmos. But no one can write more engagingly of their search for happiness. Or of their sulks when they discover too late, alas that happiness must be earned."
The New York Times Book Review
"No one more accurately depicted the American home front in fiction than Marquand did. In So Little Time and B.F.'s Daughter, he created a wealth of detail that makes both novels enormously valuable social documents; the sense they give of society coming unstuck, of people trying to find something rooted to hang onto, is still remarkably moving."
