About this Item
As new condition full brown leather hardcover boards with elaborately decorated gold front and rear cover design, gold spine lettering and decorations, gold gilt page edges on all three sides, red moire fabric front and rear endsheets, traditional four-hubbed spine, a bound-into-the-volume matching red satin ribbon page marker, and all pages are sewn into the binding (not glued). Also includes a Preliminary Page Note about the Book and Author. Illustrated with color drawings plus a double-page color frontispiece drawing by Howard Rogers. "A masterpiece." -- Literary Review. "resonates with its unflinching view of poverty, sexism, and the drive for success." "Edna Ferber once remarked that she considered the conversation of a truck driver likely to be more vigorous and stimulating that the conversation of a limousine owner. And for four decades her novels about ordinary men and women living ordinary lives -- but lives which she skillfully dramatized -- graced the American literary scene and became contemporary classics. So Big, her tale of a forceful, hard-pressed woman on a truck farm outside Chicago around the turn of the century, provides an excellent example of why the critics of the 1920s and 1930s did not hesitate to call her the greatest American woman novelist of her time. The book earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1925, in competition with novels by Joseph Hergesheimer and Lawrence Stallings, formidable contenders at the time. The illustrations are the work of Howard Rogers. In an early review, The New York Times called Ferber's work "a thoughtful book, clean and strong." The Rogers illustrations are clean and strong in their own metier and show his familiarity with the country and people that the author describes. A 60--pound Franklin Library Eggshell Wove book paper in cream shade was specially manufactured for this edition. The text is set in Bodiini Book typeface, and the binding is a fine natural leather. Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1885 to Julia and Jacob Ferber. Her father was Hungarian-born and ran a small business. Although she hoped for a career on the stage, her parents could not afford to send her to college. Instead, she went to work at the age of 17 as a reporter on the Appleton, Wisconsin, Daily Crescent. She always remembered her newspaper career (which later took her to the Milwaukee Journal) with affection and nostalgia. For reporting had imbued her with a sense of the dramatic, an eye for detail, an insatiable curiosity and a "vast storehouse of practical and psychological knowledge" -- all of which proved invaluable in her later writing. As a reporter she drove herself incessantly, so much so that at one point she developed anemia and was forced to recuperate at home. Though she was meant to rest for her recovery, she bought a second-hand typewriter for $17, began a novel, then wrote a short story that immediately was accepted by a publisher. She never returned to reporting. A dramatic writer with a keen eye for a story, Edna Ferber's novels painted something of a panorama of the American nation: she depicted show business on the Mississippi in Show Boat, frontier Oklahoma in Cimarron, life in Connecticut in American Beauty, Louisiana and New York History in Saratoga Trunk, the world of the Texas cattle barons in Giant, the Alaskan frontier in Ice Palace -- to mention only a few of her books. She possessed an uncanny ability to project herself into other environments, and she insisted that is was not necessary to have experienced, seen, or read about something in order to write about it effectively. "Life," Edna Ferber once said, "can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life is a writer's lover until death." So Big portrays with power and delicacy a resolute human spirit and shows us why Edna Ferber for many years has been one of the best-loved and most widely read of American novelists." -- The Franklin Library, from the Preliminary Page. Seller Inventory # 006652
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Bibliographic Details
Title: So Big [LEATHERBOUND LIMITED EDITION, 1925 ...
Publisher: The Franklin Library, Franklin Center, Pennsylvania
Publication Date: 1978
Binding: Hardcover
Illustrator: Rogers, Howard
Condition: As New
Edition: Limited Edition
