“So let us consider who she is and how she happened to be a writing woman. In the middle or late ’eighties of the nineteenth century she was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of Jewish parents. Her father was a Hungarian. Her mother an American, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her father was the owner of a general merchandise store, first in Iowa, then in Appleton, Wisconsin. Miss Ferber at seventeen was graduated from the Ryan High School in Appleton. For her graduating essay she wrote an account of the life of the women workers in a local mill. The local editor saw it: recognized that it was good reporting and gave her a job as local reporter at $3.00 a week—a rather princely salary twenty years ago for a new girl reporter in a country town. She wrote local items, from the court house, the city hall, the fire department, the home of the village Crœsus, and the police court. Then she was graduated from the Appleton paper to Milwaukee. In Milwaukee also she was a reporter. And while she was earning a living as a reporter she wrote ‘Dawn O’Hara,’ her first novel. It sold well. While it was in the press and selling during 1911 and ’12, the magazines began telling the story of ‘Emma McChesney.’ Here was something new; the traveling saleswoman—who was rather more woman than merchant, but who was altogether human. The character appealed to the public, and Edna Ferber had her knee in the door of success. In 1913 the stories were collected under the title ‘Roast Beef Medium,’ and that book sold well. Two years later appeared more McChesney stories under the title ‘Emma McChesney & Co.’ Then came the play ‘Emma McChesney,’ and Edna Ferber was well in the ante-room of the hall of fame, with her card going to posterity. In the meantime, a book of short stories, ‘Buttered Side Down,’ had been written and sold to the magazines and successfully published. In 1917 Miss Ferber’s second novel appeared, ‘Fanny, Herself,’ and in 1918 came ‘Cheerful by Request.’
“In 1922 all the promise of ten years of conscientious work was fulfilled, when Miss Ferber wrote ‘The Girls,’ a novel of Chicago. The humor of it, the strength of it, the art of it, must make posterity give more than a glance at Edna Ferber’s card. She has something to tell posterity about America.
“And so we must tell posterity something about her—about Edna Ferber, herself. The best description of her family life ever written, she wrote in the dedication of ‘Dawn O’Hara,’ to Julia Ferber, her ‘dear mother who frequently interrupts, and to Sister Fannie who says Sh-Sh-Sh- outside my door.’ Some shadowy hint of the life of the Ferbers after the husband and father died, and before the family moved to Chicago, may be found in the earlier chapters of ‘Fanny, Herself’—at least it is a good picture of Julia Ferber, the mother, a strong, devoted, capable woman who is a credit to her country.
“All around Edna Ferber is an atmosphere of work. She works hard and all the time. Her friends work hard, and all the time. So when she takes her typewriter in hand to tell of the world she knows, she describes a working world. It is a world deeply American. For whatever else we Americans are, we are workers. Here and there a man lives without work, a white rich man’s son or a black washerwoman’s son. We have no leisure classes. But the world of Edna Ferber’s people in its economic status is the real world of America. And she, a working woman, is typical of the modern American woman. If for any reason posterity is interested in this American world of the first three decades of the twentieth century, posterity will do well—indeed posterity probably can do no better than to tell the butler to bring Edna Ferber for a few moments and let her read ‘The Gay Old Dog,’ and ‘The Eldest.’ ”
Since Mr. White wrote the foregoing, Edna Ferber has made two big steps forward. In the volume, “Gigolo,” is to be found that masterpiece, “Old Man Minick,” to mention but one of a group of eight. The play from this story, written by her in collaboration with George S. Kaufman, has become an artistic and a financial success. The story, “Old Man Minick,” together with the play, “Minick,” have been published in a separate volume, so one can see how a short story can be turned into a successful play. It is interesting to compare the fictional use of an idea with the dramatic, especially when the work is done by the same hand.
Edna Ferber has always been interested in plays and play-writing. She has written three that I know of, and two have been highly successful. “$1,200 a Year,” written with Newman Levy, deserved a greater success than it won. As a piece of literature it deserves more than one rereading.
Of course “So Big” has done more to interest people in Edna Ferber than anything else, yet the quality that has made such a success of that book lies also in most of her earlier work. That she herself was not too sure about it is made clear in an interview, titled “How it Feels to be a Best Seller”:
“There are people who write Best Sellers as a matter of business. That is, they are in the Best Seller business. They write them, I am told, deliberately and mathematically, using a formula as a cook uses a recipe. You hear a name and you say, in your ignorance, ‘Who? . . . Who’s he?’ And the answer is, ‘He’s Whosis. You don’t mean to say you’ve never read him! He writes Best Sellers.’
“I don’t know how they do it. I don’t want to know. I suppose they have some peculiar thermometer or mechanism by which they gauge that fickle phenomenon known as the public pulse. But occasionally some one comes along who commits a Best Seller in all innocence, and with no such intent. Of such am I.
“Not only did I not plan to write a Best Seller when I wrote ‘So Big’ but I thought, when I had finished it, that I had written the world’s worst seller. Not that alone, I thought I had written a complete Non-Seller. I didn’t think anyone would ever read it. And that’s the literal truth.