Samples A collection of short stories by…Compiled for The Community Workers of the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind by Lillie Ryttenberg & Beatrice Lang.
(Ferber, Edna et al.). Samples. A collection of short stories by … Compiled for The Community Workers of the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind by Lillie Ryttenberg & Beatrice Lang. New York: Boni & Liveright, (1927).
8vo.; black cloth, stamped in yellow; dust-jacket; near fine.
First edition. Includes contributions by Sherwood Anderson, Dorothy Canfirled, Willa Cather, Dreiser, Fber, Zona Gale, Fitzgerald, Glasworthy, Hemingway, Fannie Hurst, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Elinor Wylie, and several others.
Edna Ferber (1887-1968) was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan and raised in Iowa and Wisconsin. Anti-semitism, which she experienced in the small towns of Ottouma, Iowa and Appleton, Wisconsin, influenced the rest of her life. When her father’s business failed just after graduating from high school, she took a job as a reporter for the local newspaper at the age of seventeen (“There never had been a woman reporter in Appleton”) and within a few years moved on to Milwaukee. A prolonged illness derailed her newspaper career in 1911, and she took the opportunity to write her first novel which she followed up with a series of short stories about an independent-minded traveling saleswoman named Emma McChesney. The stories proved immensely popular and established Ferber’s writing reputation. Her novel So Big received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1925 (only the third woman writer to be accorded the honor). Other critical and commercial successes followed: her 1926 novel Show Boat was transferred to the stage by Jerome Kern and the musical has become an American icon. She and George Kaufman collaborated on plays such as Royal Family, Dinner At Eight and Stage Door. In Cimarron (1929), Ferber’s “most overtly feminist novel,” the novel’s leading character, Sabra Venable Cravat” is the first woman elected by her state to the U.S. Congress. Though she had achieved an enviable position by the time of the writing of this autobiography, she devotes the last pages to the ominous situation in Europe: “It is monstrous that a single pathological madman should, in a world we thought civilized, bring down indescribable agony, humiliation and death upon hundreds of thousands of people of one religion...” She ends by invoking the same words from Exodus which open the book: “Now, therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people....”
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