Glasgow's realistic fiction novels often showed the female characters as stronger than the male characters. It was this new type of Southern fiction that made Ellen Glasgow one of the major writers of her time. The vantage point from which most of her nineteen novels were written was her native home of Richmond, Virginia. She received the Pulitzer prize in 1942. The Miller of Old Church: It was past four o'clock on a sunny October day, when a stranger, who had ridden over the corduroy road between Applegate and Old Church, dismounted near the crossroads before the small public house known to its frequenters as Bottom's Ordinary. Standing where the three roads meet at the old turnpike gate of the county, the square brick building, which had declined through several generations from a chapel into a tavern, had grown at last to resemble the smeared face of a clown under a steeple hat which was worn slightly awry.