“It was this way. I had worked on it, day after day, day after day, for many months, starting at nine each morning and working until four in the afternoon. I knew where I was going and why I wanted to get there, but after a time I became like a patient plodder who must travel weary miles along a lonely road before he arrives at the city of his destination. Mile after mile I covered the distance, sometimes traveling fairly swiftly, sometimes scarcely able to lift one tired foot after the other. When it was finished I was so dulled by contact with it that I scarcely could see it. The last stretch of the work, during June and July, had been written in Chicago. That June and July in Chicago I recall as a period during which the thermometer hovered gracefully between 90 and 96 in the shade.
“As the work of final correction began and progressed I began to dole out sheaves of copy to the typist. She used to call for a chunk of the story every day or two. She would appear at about four in the afternoon when I had finished work for the day, and when I was at my limpest, dampest and lowest. I remember her as a nice fresh-looking red-haired girl in crisp cool orchid organdie. She would make four copies of each fresh sheaf as she received it, return these, and call for more. No other soul except myself had seen a line of that story.
“Each time she called I waited eagerly, hopefully, for her to make some comment. I wanted her to say she liked Selina. I wanted her to say she didn’t care for Dirk. I wanted her to say she thought the story should have ended this way, or that. I wanted her to evince some interest in the novel; to show some liking for it, or even to show dislike. She never did.
“ ‘Well,’ said I to Miss E. Ferber, ‘that settles it. There you are, Edna! I told you so! Who would be interested in a novel about a middle-aged woman in a calico dress and with wispy hair and bad teeth, grubbing on a little truck farm south of Chicago! Nobody. Who cares about cabbages! Nobody. Who would read the thing if it came out as a novel! A dull plodding book, written because I was interested; because I wanted intensely to write it; because I had carried the thought of it around in my head for five years or more.’
“The story was to be serialized in the Woman’s Home Companion before being published in novel form. Well, that was all right. It might go well enough as a serial. But as a novel! Never.
“I wrote Mr. Russell Doubleday, of Doubleday, Page & Company, telling him that I had finished the book but that it was not, in my opinion, a book that would sell. No one, I wrote him, would read it. I thought it would be better for his firm, as publishers, and for me, as author, if we gave up the idea of publishing this story as a novel. It would be a flat failure, receiving bad reviews, having no sale.
“Mr. Doubleday replied that I might be right, but that perhaps I should let some one besides myself have a chance to judge its merits and faults. Perhaps, he said, I had been too close to it. Would I let him read it before deciding against it?
“He read it. He wrote me a letter. I keep that letter to read on rainy days when I’m not feeling well.
“ ‘So Big’ has, for some reason I can’t explain, been a best seller since it was published in February, selling on an average of a thousand a day. I know how the ugly duckling felt who turned into a swan.”
And so, unlike Dirk de Jong, who thought he was so big and wasn’t, the novel is so very big, when the author thought it of much less importance.