About this item
"A masterpiece. . . . It has the completeness, [the] finality, that grips and exalts and convinces." - Literary Review Widely regarded as the master work of celebrated author and Algonquin Round Table mainstay Edna Ferber - who also penned other classics including Show Boat, Giant, Ice Palace, Saratoga Trunk, and Cimarron - So Big is a rollicking panorama of Chicago's high and low life at the turn of the 20th Century. Following the travails of gambler's daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges, this is the stunning and unforgettable "novel to read and to remember" by an author who "critics of the 1920s and 1930s did not hesitate to call .
About the Author
Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels were popular in her lifetime and included the Pulitzer Prize-winning (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical) , (1929; made into the 1931 film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture) , and (1952; made into the 1956 Hollywood movie) .Ferber was born August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper, Jacob Charles Ferber, and his Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born wife, Julia (Neumann) Ferber. At the age of 12, after living in Chicago, Illinois and Ottumwa, Iowa, Ferber and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she graduated from high school and briefly attended Lawrence University. She took newspaper jobs at the and the before publishing her first novel. She covered the 1920 Republican National Convention and 1920 Democratic National Convention for the United Press Association. Ferber's novels generally featured strong female protagonists, along with a rich and diverse collection of supporting characters. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons; through this technique, Ferber demonstrated her belief that people are people and that the not-so-pretty people have the best character. Ferber was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of wits who met for lunch every day at the Algonquin Hotel in New York.
