Shadow on the Hearth is a science fiction novel by American writer Judith Merril, originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1950. It was her first novel. A British hardcover was published by Sidgwick & Jackson in 1953, with a paperback following from Compact Books in 1966. Italian translations appeared in 1956 and 1992; a German translation was issued in 1982. It was included in Spaced Out: Three Novels of Tomorrow, a 2008 NESFA Press omnibus compiling all Merril's novels (the other two written in collaboration with Cyril M. Kornbluth). No American paperback of Shadow on the Hearth has ever been published, although a book club edition appeared.Shadow on the Hearth tells the story of "a Westchester woman and her two children after the explosion of a series of atomic bombs on New York". Merril described it as "a very political novel, ... written for political reasons".Merril began writing Shadow on the Hearth as a short story; "When it reached ten thousand words," she remembered, "I began to understand that it wanted to be a novel." Although she stopped working on the piece when it reached twice that length, needing to spend more time with her young daughter, Doubleday editor Walter I. Bradbury read the incomplete draft and bought the novel. Merril quit her editorial job at Bantam to complete it. When she completed it, Doubleday imposed its own title (avoiding any mention of nuclear war), revising the text to create a happier ending, and wrapping the novel in a nondescript dust jacket. "On the cover was an attractive young mother, obviously in great distress: it could have been a gothic novel", Merril later groused, "or basically anything".In 1954, the Motorola TV Theatre aired an adaptation of Shadow on the Hearth, retitled Atomic Attack. Source: Wikipedia (en)