Emma McChesney Books In Publication Order
- Roast Beef Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney (1911)
- Personality Plus: Some Experiences Of Emma McChesney And Her Son, Jock (1914)
- Emma McChesney and Co. (1915)
Standalone Novels In Publication Order
- Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed (1911)
- Cheerful, by Request (1913)
- Fanny Herself (1917)
- The Girls (1921)
- Gigolo (1922)
- So Big (1924)
- Show Boat (1926)
- Stage Door (With: George S. Kaufman) (1926)
- Mother Knows Best (1927)
- Cimarron (1929)
- American Beauty (1931)
- Come and Get It (1934)
- Saratoga Trunk (1941)
- Great Son (1944)
- Giant (1952)
- Ice Palace (1958)
- A Kind of Magic (2013)
Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order
- The Homely Hero*ine (2017)
Plays In Publication Order
- $1200 A Year: A Comedy In Three Acts (With: Newman Levy) (1920)
- The Land Is Bright: A Play (2019)
Collections In Publication Order
- Buttered Side Down: Short Stories (1912)
- The Woman Who Tried to Be Good and Other Stories (1913)
- They Brought Their Women: A Book Of Short Stories (1933)
- One Basket (1947)
- Half Portions (2010)
American Biography Books In Publication Order
- A Peculiar Treasure: Autobiography (1939)
Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order
- Ferber: Edna Ferber and Her Circle (1978)
Emma McChesney Book Covers
Standalone Novels Book Covers
Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers
Plays Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
American Biography Book Covers
Non-Fiction Book Covers
Edna Ferber Books Overview
Roast Beef Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million books. com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II REPRESENTING T. A. BUCK McCHESNEY, MRS. I placo it in the background because she generally did swung off the 2:15, crossed the depot platform, and dived into the hotel ‘bus. She had to climb over the feet of a fat man in brown and a lean man in black, to do it. Long practise had made her perfect in the art. She knew that the fat man and the thin man were hogging the end seats so that they could be the first to register and get a choice of rooms when the ‘bus reached the hotel. The vehicle smelled of straw, and mold, and stables, and dampness, and tobacco, as ‘buses have from old Jonas Chuzzlewit’s time to this. Nine years on the road had accustomed Emma McChesney’s nostrils to ‘bus smells. She gazed stolidly out of the window, crossed one leg over the other, remembered that her snug suit skirt wasn’t built for that attitude, uncrossed them again, and caught the delighted and understanding eye of the fat traveling man, who was a symphony in brown brown suit, brown oxfords, brown scarf, brown hat, brown bordered handkerchief just peeping over the edge of his pocket. He looked like a colossal chocolate fudge. ‘ Red faced, grinning, and a naughty wink I’ll bet he sells coffins and undertakers’ supplies,’ mused Emma McChesney. ‘ And the other one the tall, lank, funereal affair in black I suppose his line would be sheet music,, or maybe phonographs. Or perhaps he’s a lyceum bureau reader, scheduled to give an evening of humorous readings for the Young Men’s Sunday Evening Club course at the First M. E. Church.’ During those nine years on the road for the Featherloom Skirt Company Emma McChesney had picked up a side line or two on human nature. She was not surprised to see the fat man in brown and the thin man in black leap out of the ‘bus and into the…
Personality Plus: Some Experiences Of Emma McChesney And Her Son, Jock
This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.
Emma McChesney and Co.
Edna Ferber, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of ‘Show Boat and Giant’, achieved her first great success with a series of stories featuring Emma McChesney: a smart, stylish, divorced mother who in a mere twelve years rose from stenographer to traveling sales representative to business manager and partner of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. In this final of three volumes chronicling the travels and trials of Emma McChesney, first published in 1915, Emma’s son, Jock, has moved to Chicago with his new wife. Struggling with a newly emptied nest, Emma dives into a whirlwind South American sales tour to prove she hasn’t lost her touch. Back in New York, Emma and her business partner, T. A. Buck Jr., try to disguise their budding romance from colleagues. After months of acting like a ‘captain of finance when he feels like a Romeo’, T. A. convinces Emma they should marry. Emma tries to ‘be what the yellow novels call a doll wife’ but trades in her fancy dressing gowns for more sensible business suits and heads back to the office. With one hand writing advertising copy and the other wrapped around a pair of shears, Emma saves the company from financial peril amid the arrival of some flustering, if exciting, news from Jock. By turns sales pro, newlywed, fashion maven, and anxious grandmother, Emma symbolizes the ideal woman at the dawn of the twentieth century: sharp, capable, charming, and progressive. ‘Emma McChesney and Co.‘ is enhanced by the illustrations of James Montgomery Flagg, one of the most highly regarded book illustrators of the period.
Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www. million books. com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III GOOD AS NEW OO Spring danced away, and Summer saun tered in. My pillows looked less and less tempting. The wine of the northern air imparted a cocky assurance. One blue and gold day followed the other, and I spent hours together out of doors in the sunshine, lying full length on the warm, sweet ground, to the horror; of the entire neighborhood. To be sure, I was sufficiently discreet to choose the lawn at the rear of the house. There I drank in the atmosphere, as per doctor’s instructions, while the genial sun warmed the watery blood in my veins and burned the skin off the end of my nose. All my life I had envied the loungers in the parks those silent, inert figures that lie under the trees all the long summer day, their shabby; hats over their faces, their hands clasped above their heads, legs sprawled in uncouth comfort, while the sun dapples down between the leaves and, like a good fairy godmother, touches their frayed and wrirfkled garments with flickering figures of golden splendor, while they sleep. They always seemed so blissfully care free and at ease those sprawling men figures and I, x whom such simple joys were forbidden, being a woman, had envied them. Now I was reveling in that very joy, stretched prone upon the ground, blinking sleepily up at the sun and the cobalt sky, feeling my rery hair grow, and health returning in warm, electric waves. I even dared to cross one leg over the other and to swing the pendant member with nonchalant air, first taking a cautious survey of the neighboring back windows to see if any one peeked. Doubtless they did, behind those ruffled curtains, but I grew splendidly indifferent. Even the crawling things and there were myriads of them added to the enjoyment of my ease. With my ear so close to the ground…
Cheerful, by Request
From ‘Cheerful By Request’: The editor paid for the lunch as editors do. He lighted his seventh cigarette and leaned back. The conversation, which had zigzagged from the war to Zuloaga, and from Rasputin the Monk to the number of miles a Darrow would go on a gallon, narrowed down to the thin, straight line of business. ‘Now don’t misunderstand. Please! We’re not presuming to dictate. Dear me, no! We have always felt that the writer should be free to express that which is in his ah heart. But in the last year we’ve been swamped with these drab, realistic stories. Strong, relentless things, you know, about dishwashers, with a lot of fine detail about the fuzz of grease on the rim of the pan. And then those drear and hopeless ones about fallen sisters who end it all in the East River. The East River must be choked up with ’em. Now, I know that life is real, life is earnest, and I’m not demanding a happy ending, exactly. But if you could that is would you do you see your way at all clear to giving us a fairly cheerful story? Not necessarily Glad, but not so darned Russian, if you get me. Not pink, but not all grey either. Say mauve…
.’ That was Josie Fifer’s existence. Mostly grey, with a dash of pink. Which makes mauve…
. Also included in this volume are ‘The Gay Old Dog,’ ‘The Tough Guy,’ ‘The Eldest,’ ‘That’s Marriage,’ ‘The Woman Who Tried to Be Good,’ ‘The Girl Who Went Right,’ ‘The Hooker Up the Back,’ ‘The Guiding Miss Gowd,’ ‘Sophy as She Might Have Been,’ ‘The Three of Them,’ and ‘Shore Leave.’
Fanny Herself
Heralded by one reviewer as ‘the most serious, extended and dignified of Edna Ferber’s books,’ ‘Fanny Herself‘ is the intensely personal chronicle of a young girl growing up Jewish in a small midwestern town. Packed with the warmth and the wry, sidelong wit that made Ferber one of the best loved writers of her time, the novel charts Fanny’s emotional growth through her relationship with her mother, the shrewd, sympathetic Molly Brandeis.’ You could not have lived a week in Winnebago without being aware of Mrs. Brandeis,’ Ferber begins, and likewise the story of Fanny Brandeis is inextricable from that of her vigorous, enterprising mother. Molly Brandeis is the owner and operator of Brandeis’ Bazaar, a modest general store left to her by her idealistic, commercially inept late husband. As Fanny strives to carve out her own sense of herself, Molly becomes the standard by which she measures her intellectual and spiritual progress. Fanny’s ambivalent feelings about being Jewish, her self deprecating attitude toward her gift for sketching and drawing, and her inspired success as a businesswoman all contribute to the flesh and blood complexity of Ferber’s youthful, eminently believable protagonist. She is accompanied on her journey by impeccably drawn characters such as Father Fitzpatrick, the Catholic priest in Winnebago; Ella Monahan, buyer for the glove department of the Haynes Cooper mail order house; Fanny’s brother, Theodore, a gifted violinist for whose musical education Molly sacrifices Fanny’s future; and Clarence Heyl, the scrappy columnist who never forgot how Fanny rescued him from the school bullies. Ferber’s only work of fiction with a strong autobiographical element, ‘Fanny Herself‘ showcases the author’s enduring interest in the capacity of strong women to transcend the limitations of their environment and control their own circumstances. Through Fanny’s honest struggle with conflicting values financial security and corporate success versus altruism and artistic integrity Ferber grapples with some of the most deeply embedded contradictions of the American spirit.
The Girls
Ferber’s novels generally featured strong female protagonists, although she fleshed out multiple characters in each book. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons; through this technique, Ferber demonstrated her belief that people are people and that the not so pretty persons have the best character. In this 1921 novel, she introduces and develops three characters: Great Aunt Charlotte Thrift, age 74, and Charlotte’s niece, Lottie Payson, 32, and Lottie’s niece, Charley Kemp, 18. Be sure to look for other novels by Edna Ferber.
Gigolo
Though he rarely heeded its summons cagy boy that he was the telephone rang oftenest for Nick. Because of the many native noises of the place, the telephone had a special bell that was a combination buzz and ring. It sounded above the roar of outgoing cars, the splash of the hose, the sputter and hum of the electric battery in the rear. Nick heard it, unheeding. A voice Smitty’s or Mike’s or Elmer’s answering its call. Then, echoing through the grey, vaulted spaces of the big garage: ‘Nick! Oh, Ni ick!’ From the other side of the great cement floored enclosure, or in muffled tones from beneath a car: ‘Whatcha want?’ ‘Dame on the wire.’ ‘I ain’t in.’
So Big
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and widely considered to be Edna Ferber’s greatest achievement, So Big is a classic novel of turn of the century Chicago. It is the unforgettable story of Selina Peake DeJong, a gambler’s daughter, and her struggles to stay afloat and maintain her dignity and her sanity in the face of marriage, widowhood, and single parenthood. A brilliant literary masterwork from one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished and admired writers, the remarkable So Big still resonates with its unflinching view of poverty, sexism, and the drive for success.
Show Boat
1926. Pulitzer Prize winning author Edna Ferber’s famous novel, Show Boat, tells parallel love stories of two doomed marriages that are set on a Mississippi Show Boat. Magnolia, the sheltered daughter of the Cotton Blossom’s owner, falls in love and runs off to Chicago with a dashing riverboat gambler. Their marriage is wrecked by his love for Lady Luck and she returns home to her family to have her baby. Ultimately, she reconciles with her wandering mate to give the marriage another try. The star singer on the Cotton Blossom, beautiful Julie LaVerne and her husband run afoul of Southern law when the sheriff discovers that she is mulatto and her husband is white. They are forced to leave the Show Boat and flee because Southern law forbids miscegenation. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.
Cimarron
Restless Yancey Cravat, a pioneer newspaper editor and lawyer, settles in Osage, a muddy town thrown together overnight when the Oklahoma territory opens in 1889. To this place he brings his wife Sabra, a woman both conventional and well bred. Against all odds, Sabra develops a brilliant business sense. She makes a success of the newspaper, a success that ultimately leads her to Congress. Through Sabra’s eyes we see the violent frontier collide with resentful Indians, the sodbusters tame the prairie, and the sudden fortune of a lucky few. ‘A ripping yarn…
a gorgeous piece of work.’ Saturday Review of Literature
Saratoga Trunk
The basis for the classic film starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, Saratoga Trunk unfolds the story of Clio Dulaine, an ambitious Creole beauty who more than meets her match in Clint Maroon, a handsome Texan with a head for business and an eye for beautiful young women. Together they do battle with Southern gentry and Eastern society, but in their obsession to acquire all they’ve ever wanted, they fail to realize they already have all they’ll ever need each other.
Giant
This sweeping tale captures the essence of Texas on a staggering scale as it chronicles the life and times of cattleman Jordan ‘Bick’ Benedict, his naive young society wife, Leslie, and three generations of land rich sons. A sensational story of power, love, cattle barons, and oil tycoons, Giant was the basis of the classic film starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson.
Ice Palace
This is the story of Alaska before statehood, in all its glory, beauty and bleakness…
where men pitted themselves against the elements and the wilds, only to find the greatest threat is from ‘outside.’ Edna Ferber is one of the best selling novelists of this century, including her Pulitzer Prize novel SO BIG.
Buttered Side Down: Short Stories
This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.
The Woman Who Tried to Be Good and Other Stories
Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman ‘ so bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street, from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having a man doff his hat to her or a woman bow. You passed her on the street with a surreptitious glance, though she was well worth looking at ‘ in her furs and laces and plumes. She had the only full length mink coat in our town, and Ganz’s shoe store sent to Chicago for her shoes. Hers were the miraculously small feet you frequently see in stout women. Also includes ‘The Gay Old Dog,’ ‘That’s Marriage,’ ‘Farmer in the Dell,’ ‘Un Morso doo Pang,’ ‘Long Distance,’ ‘The Maternal Feminine.’
One Basket
Includes the Woman Who Tried to Be Good, the Gay Old Dog, That’s Marriage, Farmer in the Dell, Un Morso Doo Pang, Long Distance, and The Maternal Feminine.
Half Portions
‘The short stories in this collection take the reader from small town Wisconsin to the bustling streets of New York and Chicago and back again. While they range greatly in length and tone, they all share the trademark wit and affectionate insight of Edna Ferber. Showcasing the facility with words that made her a mainstay at the Algonquin round table, Ferber explores some of her favorite themes: the role of women especially strong or unconventional women in modern society, the mores of the midwestern small town, and the changes over time in relationships between parents and children. In ‘The Maternal Feminine,’ a plain, overlooked child grows into a strong, resourceful businesswoman and forms a strong motherly bond with the children of her more attractive sister. In ‘April 25th, As Usual,’ an aging Wisconsin couple reluctantly join their successful daughter in New York, where they try to adjust to a very different lifestyle. ‘Old Lady Mandle’ is a bittersweet tale about an elderly Chicago mother coming to terms with the fact that she is no longer the most important woman in the life of her grown son. ‘One Hundred Per Cent’ features Ferber’s celebrated hero*ine Emma McChesney, now re married, seeing her husband off to war. The stories gathered here are beautifully observed chronicles of early twentieth century life and are filled with characters who, despite their very human foibles, are all bestowed by Ferber with warmth and dignity. All these stories and all these pages are thronged with real men and women, and in them Miss Ferber continues to display not merely her skill at story telling, but also her greater skill at breathing into them the breath of life.’ ‘Boston Transcript’.
Ferber: Edna Ferber and Her Circle
This enduring biography of the popular writer begins with Ferber’s last years in New York City, exploring the setting in which she did all of her great writing. Diaries, copious correspondence, and the cooperation of distinguished living friends have resulted in a rich portrait of a period and a literary circle not yet fully documented, and an insightful engaging analysis of a woman writer highly influential in the shaping of twentieth century America.
Related Authors