My Own Four Walls: A Philadelphia Newspaper Columnist as Homesteader Between the Wars

Don Rose came to the U.S. from England in 1908, when he was 18, entering through Ellis Island like countless other immigrants. By 1941 he was one of Philadelphia's best-known newspaper columnists. That year he published his gentle, funny memoir My Own Four Walls, the story of the ramshackle farmhouse he and Marjorie, his wife, bought in 1918 for themselves and their 12 children.

One of his grandsons, Neil Genzlinger, himself a journalist at the New York Times, here brings that book back to...