So Big by Edna Ferber: Another recommendation for an early Pulitzer winner

In my last post I recommended five novels that won the Pulitzer 70 or more years ago but are now more or less lost and forgotten. After I finish reading one of the Pulitzer winners, I write my views and opinion about the book. This helps me process what I have read and decide what I think of it. I also do this writing in the hope that it might help you to decide whether or not to read the work. The Pulitzer Prize for fiction is given to an American author who preferably writes about the American experience. Given this guideline for the prize, after I have read a Pulitzer winner, I like to reflect on what aspects of American life have been dealt with in the novel, what I may have learned, and how my thinking about the American experience has been influenced by the work.



In this blog I want to share my thinking about Edna Ferber's So Big.




So Big by Edna Ferber, 1924
Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925, Read in 2006

So Big tells the story of the transformation of American society in the late 19th century from agrarian to industrialized city living and to a more prosperous way of living. In some ways, think So Big has some parallels with The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck with the story moving from China to Chicago. In So Big a young woman, Selena Peake moves from Chicago to High Prairie in the farm land outside Chicago to be a school teacher, after her father dies and she has to support herself. Selena ends up marrying Pervus DeJong, a Dutch-American farmer, and has a son named Dirk. Selena calls her son “So Big” because when she asks him how big he is, Dirk spreads his arms and says, “so big.” Selena’s husband Pervus is a truck farmer who grows vegetables and hauls them to Chicago to sell them.

The story gets interesting after Pervus dies unexpectedly and Selena has to take over the truck farm. So Big (Dirk) works with his mother and plays by her side in the fields. Selena drives a horse-drawn wagon, leaving the farm early in the morning, and arriving in Chicago in time to claim a spot in the produce market. Dirk rides along with his mother on the weekly trip to market. Selena learns the truck farming business and becomes well-known for her excellent, clean vegetables.

This is where the similarity with The Good Earth comes in. Because Selena is so successful with her farm, she wants what’s best for Dirk and sends him to a good school. By now Dirk is tired of being called So Big and he is soon ready to leave High Prairie to be educated in Chicago. Wang Lung in The Good Earth did something similar with his sons when he became a prosperous farmer. It sounds like a good thing but what do the sons miss out on as they are having a good life handed to them with little effort on their own part? Dirk begins to enjoy big city life and goes on to college. Selena is in favor of this and wants Dirk to be an architect. She wants Dirk to create art through the buildings he will design. However, Dirk goes off to World War I and comes back having lost his interest in architecture and art. He found that he cannot earn enough money as an architect, so he went into banking. Dirk made good money as a banker selling bonds and was able to support his expensive lifestyle, trying to keep up with the wealthy friends he has made in Chicago. Meanwhile, Selena keeps on farming. She tries to get Dirk to see what is missing in his life but he has too many other things to attend to.

So Big gets me thinking about what has happened countless times as sons of successful parents fail to appreciate what those who went before them had to work for in order to be successful. Wang Lung’s sons enjoy the benefits of his hard work and then wait for him to die so they can divide up the property and sell it. It isn’t clear at the end of So Big what Dirk will do with what Selena has worked for. However, Selena has a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment with what she has done with her life given her difficult time of making a living when her husband died and left her with a small son. Where Selena devoted her life to building something, an excellent truck farm, Dirk seemed to want the good life and use wealth for pleasure. It seems like it takes very wise and tough parents to keep from spoiling or harming their children by the fruits of their own hard work and success.

Forgotten novels I discovered on the Pulitzer winners list

I love the earlier winners of the Pulitzer Prize. When I started finding out about winners for fiction, I had the pleasant experience of discovering some great novels that I had never heard of. Without my interest in the Pulitzer winners, I likely would never have learned of them. On the other hand, there are some very well-known early winners of the prize that we all know: The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton, Arrowsmith (1925) by Sinclair Lewis, The Good Earth (1931) by Pearl S. Buck, Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, The Yearling (1938) by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck. It was interesting for me to discover that these novels that I had enjoyed reading had won the Pulitzer Prize.

Now for the novels that I had never heard of until I started searching for the Pulitzer winners. Here are the books that stand out for me as great winners of the Pulitzer that I discovered because they won the award. See how many of them you had heard of before you became interested in the Pulitzer winners.

One of Ours (1922) by Willa Cather

So Big (1924) by Edna Ferber

Scarlet Sister Mary (1928) by Julia Peterkin

Laughing Boy (1929) by Oliver LaFarge

The Store (1932) by T. S. Stribling

The picture at the top of this post shows my copy of each of these books and I am fortunate to have a 1st edition copy of all of them. The importance of literary awards has become clear to me as I realize that the novels listed above might go unnoticed by readers of good fiction if not for the Pulitzer Prize. For example, none of these novels was known to my wife or my daughter who were both English majors in college and avid readers after college.

So, if you are looking for a good Pulitzer winner to read, I highly recommend each of these five books. In future posts I will give my brief review and opinion of each these novels.

Selecting a Pulitzer to read

Title page and illustration from my 1918 edition of The Magnificent Ambersons

In this post I am going share some of my thoughts about selecting a Pulitzer winner to read. The image above is the title page of my copy of The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. It was written in 1918 and won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1919. It was the second novel to win the award. I have a 1st edition copy of the book, the oldest in my Pulitzer collection. The first owner, Beatrice A. McCormick, wrote her name on the inside cover in 1919. I mention all this to make a point: I find it most enjoyable to read an early edition of the Pulitzer winners. For me it needs to be hardcover and maybe falling apart a little bit so you have to be careful with it. I like the large print on the soft old paper. The old edition feels good in my hands and I feel that I am able to go back in time more completely with the antique edition. Another benefit of the older editions is that they sometimes have wonderful illustrations, as you see in image of my copy of The Great Ambersons. Some collectors would not think of actually reading their rare, old edition of a book but I like the experience. My edition of The Magnificent Ambersons also has the original dustjacket and that is quite rare. The dustjacket adds greatly to the value of the book. However, when I read my old editions, I always remove the dustjacket, if my copy of the book has one. If you are interested in finding and possibly buying an old, rare edition of the early winners of the Pulitzer, my advice is to hurry. They are truly rare and often hard to find, especially if you want one in good condition with a dustjacket.

How do you find an old edition of a Pulitzer winner? I have spent many happy hours poking around in used bookstores across the U.S. I have found some treasures that way but the bookstore owners usually know what the book is worth. So, you don't often pick up an early edition for less than it is worth. However, I have been lucky to buy some early editions for a low price. I paid only $25.00 for my 1st edition of The Magnificent Ambersons. I love finding used bookstores in the cities I visit, from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida and New York to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The French Quarter in New Orleans may be my favorite book hunting grounds because there are 8 to 10 used bookstores within easy walking distance of each other in the Quarter. Some of my best bargains have been in used bookstores in Utah and I think it's because fewer collectors have been there before me.

The other way I have acquired many of my old and rare editions is through online sales. I recommend going to the AbeBooks.com website at http://www.abebooks.com/
AbeBooks.com lists used and new books that can be ordered online from bookstores across the U.S. You can search for the book you want and specify an early edition and a dustjacket. But don't be surprised if the list price is $1000 or more. You pay more for a 1st edition of a book with a dustjacket that is in mint condition. I saw listed a copy of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck for $10,000. It was tempting but I knew I couldn't explain the purchase or hide it from my wife, so I settled for a lot less expensive edition.

If you don't feel that you can purchase a copy of an early edition of one of the Pulitzer winners, don't let this keep you from reading them. I recommend trying your local library. I actually got started reading older editions of older novels by borrowing an early edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a novel written by Betty Smith in 1943. My daughter had checked it out from the library and I read it while I was visiting in her home. The look and feel of this old edition of a great novel that probably should have won the Pulitzer but did not gave me my start in reading and enjoying the old editions. By the way, I now have my own 1st edition copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn that I found in a used bookstore for $5.00. So check the library if you want a reading experience that is, in my opinion, better than reading a new paperback edition of a great old novel. And if you can, try finding your own copy of an old edition of a Pulitzer winner. I haven't found and bought all of them.

Some of my thoughts on leisure reading and Following the Thread

In my leisure reading over the years, I have generally found two types of books. There are books like The Yearling that are written in a way that makes me want to savor every word and a story that is compelling and beautiful as it unfolds. In The Yearling the story flows along with few excursions into material that might "sidetrack" me as I read. I know I'm getting into tricky territory now as I write about what I like in leisure reading. But remember, this is about my opinion. Your opinion may be quite different. Maybe you like to read a novel that explores the sidetracks as well as a flowing story.

Now that I have described my reading of The Yearling, I'll talk about a different kind of book, still fiction but different from the kind that sweeps you along on a story line with few excursions. Some years ago I read Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. This is considered one of the greatest works of American fiction and is well-worth reading. That said, I also have to point out that Moby-Dick is a good example of one of those novels that takes the reader on long excursions into rather lengthy discourses on many subjects having to do with whales and the whaling industry of the 19th century. For example, Melville gives the reader 11 pages of material on various kinds of pictures of whales and whaling, from engravings to paintings on wood. This sidetrack, if you wish to see it as such, comes in the middle of an interesting account of Captain Ahab's pursuit of the great white whale. It became a bit frustrating for me to be reading the interesting story and then be switched over to a lengthy treatise on pictures of whales or any number of other topics.

So, here is how I ended up reading Moby-Dick. I call this kind of pleasure reading "Following the Thread." I decide after starting a book like Moby-Dick that there is a thread of a good story that I want to follow. So, I set my purpose in reading to follow that story and enjoy the reading experience. I read the first chapter or two to discover the setting, plot, characters, and general idea of the book. By this point I have probably seen the author's intent as it was with Melville, to educate the reader on many aspects of whales and whaling as well as to tell the story. If I decide that my purpose in reading is to enjoy the story, I start following the thread and skimming through parts that strike me as excursions into areas that are not crucial to pursuing the story. I skim, which for me means to quickly glance over what is written and to search for where the story thread starts again. Once I find the thread, I read more carefully to enjoy the story. When the side excursion begins again, I start skimming once again in order to pick up the thread of the story. The way I read depends on my purpose and I find following the thread to be a flexible approach to reading when my purpose is to enjoy a good story.

The following the thread strategy helped me read Moby-Dick in about half the time it would have taken me to read it all straight through. I am currently using following the thread with American Pastoral by Philip Roth which won the Pulitzer in 1998. This book has a thread of a story that is embedded in a lot of material that strikes me as uninteresting and not very crucial to the story. I want to finish American Pastoral and get the satisfaction of the story Roth is telling but I can't handle the sidetracks. I know when I am encountering too many sidetracks because I feel like giving up on a novel. At that point I stop and ask myself if the story is worth experiencing and if it is the sidetracks that are leading me to want to quit. If both of these points is true, I then decide my purpose is to read the story and I start following the thread.

Before I leave my discussion of following the thread, I would like to add that the strategy might apply to academic or professional reading as well as to leisure reading. In non-leisure reading, I find myself skimming through material and sampling what is there and then picking up on the thread of the most relevant material in the piece I am reading. Again, it all depends on my purpose and having a clear purpose in reading strikes me as the best way to decide how I am going to read anything from a professional journal article to the sports page in the newspaper. I hope this excursion into following the thread has been a worthwhile sidetrack for you. Happy purpose-directed reading!