“Until he was almost ten the name stuck to him…”
First serialized in Women’s Home Companion Magazine, a magazine which boasted the largest readership in America at the time, So Big by Edna Ferber has taken some time for me to mull over. As a bestseller, it was an enjoyable read, albeit a somewhat scattered, on-the-nose “message” novel. Published in 1924, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1925, So Big is a book that strives to find beauty in the ordinary. It rejects modern materialism while seeking to expose American capitalist orthodoxy for its empty promise of providing both money and happiness at the same time. So Big is a novel that highlights the tension between city and country (i.e. the city of Chicago versus rural Illinois farmland), and it seeks to confront the moral gulf existing between an honest tradesman and a hypocritical scam artist. The story for So Big is loosely based on the life of Dutch immigrant, Antje Paarlberg (a famously resilient immigrant from the Netherlands who fled her native country for the United States as a result of high taxes, a supposedly excessively tolerant State Church, as well as famine and disease). The Paarlberg family later expressed dismay with the publication of So Big, claiming the novel misrepresented Antje Paarlberg’s life.
The first half of So Big presents the early life of Selina Peake, a fun-loving girl who is raised by her charming but gambling-addicted father. They travel throughout the United States together until he dies (shot and killed in a gambling house) at which point she moves to the high prairie in Illinois, which is based on the region of South Holland, Illinois. Selina takes a job as a country school teacher among the midwest Dutch immigrant community, though she clearly feels out of place. She had initially moved to the Illinois farmland in order to save up enough money to eventually relocate to Chicago, a place where the world seems bright and exciting! However, Selina soon finds herself embracing the pleasant rolling farmland of the high prairie –even celebrating the beauty of cabbage fields in Illinois. Soon, she notices a shy boy named Roelf Pool –an artistic child to whom she offers reading lessons. On one dramatic night at a local musical, the town begins ‘bidding’ on the young and eligible ladies. All the men clamor for Selina, much to her surprise, until a quiet but strong and tall widower named Pervus DeJong wins her over with what little material possessions he owns. Shortly thereafter, Selina begins giving Pervus DeJong reading lessons, as well, and before long they fall in love and are married. Meanwhile, Roelf Pool flees the country for France to pursue a career as an artist. In a bittersweet moment of maturity, Selina weeps for joy on behalf of Roelf (her first crush).
In the second half of the book, Selina gives birth to a boy named Dirk DeJong. Everyone asks her ‘how big is the baby?’ to which she responds ‘S-o-o-o-o big’ –hence the nickname of her son “SoBig” (even though, as Selina says, Dirk is not actually a particularly large boy). Years go by and their little family farm struggles. One day, Pervus returns home from selling vegetables in Chicago. He suddenly falls ill and dies, leaving Selina alone to tend to the farm by hreself. She quickly begins executing business decisions for the farm. She travels to the bustling corner of Haymarket Street in Chicago in order to sell her vegetables. Eventually her asparagus produce finds a market in the city, and the farm becomes a success once again. She sends Dirk away to college (at a school that later became the University of Chicago) so that he may be educated in all things refined and beautiful. When he eventually graduates, Dirk pursues a career as an architect in Chicago with dreams of constructing wondrous structures like the elegant classical edifices of Europe, but he is soon lured into a more lucrative career as a bond salesman. A married woman named Paula urges Dirk to make the career change –she claims to be in love with Dirk. After all, she asks Dirk, where is the utility in beauty? You can make just as much money working out of a box as a cathedral.
Selina becomes distraught at her son over his rejection of a career as an artisan. In her eyes, he has traded a life beauty and art for an empty, soulless life in the rapacious world of American capitalism. His financial firm focuses on selling bonds to vulnerable elderly widows or single women, thereby swindling them out of money. This also takes place at the height of the economic expansion, the Gilded Age –an era of loose credit and plenty of money. Dirk eventually falls in love with another woman, a young and carefree artist named Dallas O’Mara. One day, Roelf Pool returns to Chicago to visit with an old European General, and he decides to stop by the DeJong farm outside the city. At home, Dirk feels out of place as both his mother and Dallas clearly fawn over Roelf for his exotic life in Europe. Roelf’s hands are rough from years of craftsmanship; his artistry has made him a more attractive person. When she was young, Selina’s father used to say there are two kinds of people: wheat and emerald. Selina says Roelf is emerald, and Roelf says Selina is wheat –both are beautiful in their own right. However, Dirk realizes that he does not seem to fit into this binary. Dirk “SoBig” DeJong then returns to Chicago, dejected and alone at the end of the novel.
Unsurprisingly, Selina is the hero of this novel. Ferber asks us to contrast her eternal optimism with Dirk’s moral murkiness. Selina is an innovative, free-spirited, lover of beauty. She does not heed the popular path of living a wealthy urbanite life. She pursues her own success and happiness, finding both, while Dirk is sadly absorbed by the passing wave of glamour (bond-selling in Chicago). Still, Selina is a complex character. As a young and carefree woman, she is open to all that the world offers, and as such, her life takes an unexpected turn –she becomes a struggling farmer’s wife, and then a widow. Yet she is still happy. In the writings of Edna Ferber, we find the American dream hidden in plain sight, like finding appreciation for beautiful rows of Midwest cabbage plants, or celebrating a successful asparagus harvest. Yet it is complicated. As with other early winners of the Pulitzer Prize, So Big, addresses the idea of changing times in American life: cultural changes in technology, fashion trends, moral progress, and so on. Yet it reaffirms the idea that hope and happiness can prevail over these frightening new upheavals. There are still people who are “emerald” or “wheat” in a world driven by greed. In this respect So Big, like many other early winners of the Pulitzer Prize, worships at the altar of rugged individualism and it embraces a sense of good old-fashioned American piety.
Ferber once lamented So Big, calling it little more than a theme –“I wrote it against my judgment; I wanted to write it…Nothing ever really happened in the book. It had no plot at all, as book plots go. It had a theme, but you had to read that for yourself between the lines.” She said it was a “story on the triumph of failure.” In a moment hesitation about publishing the book, Ferber once wrote to her publisher: “Who would be interested in a novel about a middle-aged woman in a calico dress with wispy hair and bad teeth, grubbing on a little truck farm south of Chicago?” But nevertheless Doubleday loved the book, apparently editors were crying upon first read, and naturally they accepted it. This proved to be a sound business decision as So Big sold hundreds of thousands of copies in its first year of publication alone and it sat atop the annual Publishers Weekly bestseller list for 1924.
Notable Quotations:
“In his way and day he was a very modern father. ‘I want you to see all kinds,’ he would say to her. ‘I want you to realize that this whole thing is just a grand adventure. A fine show. The trick is to play in it and look at it at the same time.’
‘The whole thing?’
‘Living. All mixed up. The more kinds of people you see, and the more things you do, and the more things that happen to you, the richer you are. Even if they’re not pleasant things. That’s living. Remember no matter what happens, good or bad, it’s just so much’ -he used the gambler’s term, unconsciously-‘just so much velvet.’ (page 6 -Selina’s father speaking to her).
“She was aware of a kinship with the earth; an illusion of splendour, or fulfilment. Sometimes, in a moment’s respite from her work about the house, she would standing the kitchen doorway, her flushed face turned toward the fields. Wave on wave of green, wave on wave, until the waves melted into each other and became a verdant sea” (page 71).
“More than ten years ago she had driven with Klaas Pool up that same road for the first time, and in spite of the recent tragedy of her father’s death, her youth, her loneliness, the terrifying thought of the new home to which she was going, a stranger among strangers, a warm little thrill of elation, of excitement – of adventure! That was it. “The whole thing’s just a grand adventure,” her father, Simeon Peake, had said. And now the sensations of that day were repeating themselves. Now, as then, she was doing what was considered a revolutionary and daring thing; a thing that High Prairie regarded with horror. And now, as then, she took stock. Youth was gone, but she had health, courage; a boy of nine; twenty-five acres of wornout farm land; dwelling and out-houses in a bad state of repair; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that” (page 97).
“‘Yes. All the worth-while things in life. All mixed up. Rooms in candle-light. Leisure. Colour. Travel. Books. Music. Pictures. People -all kinds of people. Work that you love. And growth -growth and watching people grow. Feeling very strongly about things and then developing that feeling to-to make something fine come of it…That’s what I mean by beauty. I want Dirk to have it'” (page 123 -Selina’s idea of beauty for Dirk).
About The 1925 Pulitzer Prize
The 1925 Novel Jury consisted of the following mebers:
- Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
- William Allen White (1868-1944) was the owner and editor the Emporia Gazette in Kansas, had served on the Biography Juries in 1923 and 1924, and this was his first time serving on a Novel Jury. He was a friend and colleague of Edna Ferber –both of them being Midwesterners and members of the same literary circles. Edna Ferber had even dedicated one of her novels to William White. He strongly advocated for Ferber’s So Big to win the Pulitzer, but he ultimately conceded that Balisand was acceptable as an alternative, since his fellow Juror was adamantly against awarding the prize to So Big. He won a Pulitzer in 1923 for reporting.
- Oscar W. Firkins (1864-1932) was born in Minnesota and served on the faculty at the University of Minnesota for many years. He wrote numerous literary biographies of Jane Austen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Dean Howells. He was a literary critic for The Nation (1912-1917). Firkins was disappointed in the ethics of fellow Juror William White’s advocacy for his friend’s novel to win the Pulitzer. However, in the end the advisory board rejected Balisand and chose So Big. Professor Firkins was so incensed at the decision that he returned his $100 honorarium check afforded to all Jurors for their work and refused to participate again. The 1925 selection was tense to say the least. Juror William White later served on the Pulitzer Board for six years.
Apparently there was a minor conflict in 1925 among the members of the Pulitzer jury about whether or not to split the award between Edna Ferber’s So Big and Joseph Hergesheimer’s Balisand, a novel about a Revolutionary War hero. A third choice follow-up was Laurence Stallings’s Plumes, the story of a soldier who returns home from World War I disabled and disillusioned. Eventually the Pulitzer Advisory Board selected So Big, and today, the other two runner-ups are largely forgotten. The 1925 Novel Jury was composed of Jefferson B. Fletcher (Chair), O.W. Firkins, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, William Allen White. During deliberations, White preferred So Big, Professor O.W. Firkins strongly desired Balisand, and Fletcher had trouble making up his mind. Eventually, White prevailed and the Board agreed. Apparently, White had a “devilish lust for propaganda” and therefore favored Edna Ferber’s appeal for a better creative spirit in America (according to former Pulitzer Prize administrator John Hohenberg). In documentation compiled by Heinz D. Fischer and Erika J. Fischer, Professor O.W. Firkins wrote to Frank Fackenthal to register his “emphatic protest” at such an “iniquitous decision” and he angrily returned the hundred dollar check he had been paid for his service on the Pulitzer jury.
Apparently, Edna Ferber donated her Pulitzer Prize money to the Author’s League, an organization that cared for elderly artisans and writers.
Who Is Edna Ferber?
Edna Ferber (1885-1968) was once a popular name in American literature. Her 1968 obituary in The New York Times stated: “Her books were not profound, but they were vivid and had a sound sociological basis. She was among the best read novelists in the nation, and critics of the nineteen-twenties and thirties did not hesitate to call her the greatest American woman novelist of her day.” Her most notable books included Pulitzer Prize-winner, So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926), a multi-generational story of a traveling theater steamboat as it floats along the Mississippi River during American Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and up to the Jazz Age –it was later made into a successful musical; and Cimarron (1929), the story of a family during the Oklahoma Land Rush living in the Cimarron Territory where they build a successful newspaper company. Feel free to read my review of the Academy Award-winning film adaptation of Cimarron (1931).
Edna Ferber’s mother, Julia Neumann, was from a German-Jewish family who emigrated to the United States seeking political freedom in the 1840s, first arriving in Milwaukee and then Chicago (they fled the Chicago Fire in 1871 and relocated to Chicago’s northside). Her father, Jacob Charles Ferber, also Jewish, was born in Hungary and came to America alone at age 17. Julia and Jacob met in Chicago, and although Julia was in love with someone else who was not Jewish, but Jacob had $25,000 to his name (and he was Jewish) so Julia’s mother insisted they would make a good match. Edna later reflected in her autobiography that her mother never truly loved her father. At any rate, the Ferbers moved to Kalamazoo and opened a dry goods store. In 1882, they had their first daughter Fannie, and three years later Edna arrived (they were expecting to have a boy and so had the name “Ed” ready to name the child). Despite the financial success of the dry goods store, Edna’s father insisted and moving the family back to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair, however this yielded very little, so they relocated to Ottumwa where they faced severe discrimination and antisemitism, thus the family relocated again to Appleton. Unfortunately, her father was not a very astute businessman and he soon began suffering from a rare ocular degenerative disease.
Ferber, as her friends called her, traveled frequently as a child due to her father’s blindness, she lived all throughout the Midwest and her mother was forced to take on various odd jobs. This left the children to be raised by “hired girls,” perhaps not unlike Willa Cather’s famous bohemian helper, Ántonia. With dreams of attending college and becoming an actor, Ferber eventually abandoned her dream of becoming as a result of her family’s financial troubles. She worked for a spell as a journalist for a “cocky, liberal paper in a cocky, liberal midwest town,” The Appleton Daily Crescent. However, she was soon fired for having an “aggressive style.” She then went to work for the Milwaukee Journal but was forced to leave after collapsing, an apparent result of anemia. While recovering at home, she purchased a second-hand typewriter for $17 and began writing short stories and novels. Her first published short story was “Homely Heroine” (1910) in Everybody’s Magazine, and her first novel was Dawn O’Hara, The Girl Who Laughed (1911). She gained nationwide fame with her series of stories about Emma McChesney, a traveling saleswoman who sold underskirts. In total, about thirty of these stories were published in a variety of magazines until Ferber simply refused to write any more of them. They were so popular, in fact, that when Ferber met President Theodore Roosevelt at the Republican Convention in 1904, he reportedly asked, “What are going to do about Emma McChesney?”
After her father died (the result of a fall), Ferber’s mother sold the family store and moved back to Chicago.
In total, Edna Ferber wrote thirteen novels, two autobiographies, and a variety of novellas, short stories, and plays. Critics and scholars have often noted that racial discrimination and the plight of women are two chief recurring themes in her works (her books tend to portray strong female protagonists). She had a firm but tenacious practice of writing for at least nine hours each day (or at least one thousand words per day, often typing away in trains and hotels while she traveled). Interestingly enough, Ferber frequently wrote about places she had minimal, if any, first-hand experience. For example, So Big is about a farming family, though Ferber never had any connection to a farming family; she learned about “Showboats” while backstage at a performance of Minick and wrote the play despite never having witnessed a floating musical on the Mississippi; and Cimarron is about the growth of the Oklahoma frontier, even though Ferber only ever briefly visited the state for ten days. After winning the Pulitzer Prize for So Big, Ferber began floating in prominent literary circles in New York City and gained quite a following, one of her admirers was Theodore Roosevelt whom she had met at the 1904 Republican Convention. She was also friends with Katharine Hepburn and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner, Louis Bromfield. Politically, Ferber endorsed President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940. She was a semi-regular member of Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, critics, actors, and wits who met everyday for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City.
Ferber never married and she never had any children (she was also never known to have had any romantic liaisons during her lifetime). She died of stomach cancer at her home (730 Park Avenue) in New York City at the age of 82 in 1968. She was cremated, her ashes were then scattered in an unknown location. Her literary estate was left to her sister Fannie and two nieces, Mina Fox Klein and Janet Goldsmith. In 2013, Ferber was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. Lastly, in its obituary for Edna Ferber The New York Times noted similarities between Ferber and her So Big protagonist Selina: “But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and Burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”
Film Adaptations:
- So Big (1924)
- Director: Charles Brabin
- Starring: Colleen Moore
- So Big (1932)
- Director: William A. Wellman
- Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, George Brent
- So Big (1953)
- Director: Robert Wise
- Starring: Jane Wyman, Sterling Hayden, Nancy Olson
Further Reading:
- Show Boat (1926)
- Chronicles the lives of three generations of performers on the “Cotton Blossom,” a floating theater on a steamboat that travels between small towns along the Mississippi River. It was made into a celebrated musical of the same name.
- Cimarron (1930)
- A historical novel that takes place during the Oklahoma Land Rush within the “Cimarron” territory. It was made into a film Cimarron (1931) which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. A remake of the film was also released in 1960.
- Dinner at Eight (1932)
- A three-act play written with G. S. Kaufman. It was made into a famous film of the same name Dinner at Eight (1933) as well as several other remakes and interpretations.
- Saratoga Trunk (1941)
- About a notorious Creole woman who returns to her native New Orleans and marries a Texas gambler. It was made into a 1945 film and a stage musical simply entitled “Saratoga.”
- Giant (1952)
- A novel about a ranch family in Texas during the oil boom. It was a made into a musical of the same name.
Literary Context in 1924-1925:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1924): awarded to Polish author Wladyslaw Reymont (1867–1925) “for his great national epic, The Peasants.”
- Per Publishers Weekly, the #1 bestselling novel in 1924 was So Big by Edna Ferber.
- Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln (“Max”) Schuster established the New York City publisher Simon & Schuster, which initially specialized in crossword puzzle books.
- Ford Madox Ford published the first of four volumes set around World War I, titled Parade’s End. It was completed in 1928.
- E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India was published in England. He wrote no further fiction in the remaining 46 years of his life.
- Buddenbrooks, the first of Thomas Mann’s works to appear in English, was published in a translation by the American Helen T. Lowe-Porter. The original German appeared in 1901.
- Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville (d. 1891) was posthumously published.
- The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
The history of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has often resembled a delicate balancing act between either honoring popular works of fiction or truly enduring works of great literature. The challenge of the Pulitzer Prize has been to build a canon of American literature without the benefit of hindsight. Part of me appreciates this ongoing dialectic because otherwise I would likely have never encountered novels like So Big by Edna Ferber. Her books were once towering giants of 20th century popular fiction, and So Big was even listed as required reading in many schools, but her readership is more niche today, her name is almost entirely forgotten. If compelled to search for an an alternative to So Big for the Pulitzer Prize in 1925, a wonderful choice in my view would have been Herman Melville’s posthumously published masterpiece Billy Budd, Sailor which was finally released in 1924.
Ferber, Edna. So Big. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1995 (originally published in 1924).