Читать онлайн «So Big»
Автор Эдна Фербер
Prairie State Books
Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War
Life in Prairie Land
Carl Sandburg
The Sangamon
American Years
The Jungle
Twenty Years at HullHouse
They Broke the Prairie
The Illinois
The Valley of Shadows: Sangamon Sketches
The Precipice
Across Spoon River
The Rivers of Eros
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843
Black Hawk: An Autobiography
You Know Me Al
Chicago Poems
Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness
City of Discontent
Wau-Bun: The “Early Day” in the North-West
Spoon River Anthology
Studs Lonigan
True Love: A Comedy of the Affections
Windy McPherson’s Son
So Big
Table of Contents
Introduction
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Introduction
One day while browsing in a vintage bookstore in Evanston, Illinois, I casually mentioned to the proprietor that the University of Illinois Press was planning to reprint Edna Ferbers novel So Big in its Prairie State Books series. A man at the counter smiled, caught my eye, and ex-claimed: “Wonderful! I love Ferber! I’ve read all of her works!” Such a warm response reminded me that Ferber was once one of our most popular writers.
Shortly after Edna Ferber died on April 17, 1968, following a lengthy bout with cancer, the New York Times lauded the “love and enthusnasm” with which “she wrote about the United States for four [actually, five] decades. ” The Times paid the mixed homage of calling her novels “minor classics,” suggesting that popularity precluded profundity, and concluded, with the typical American ambivalence toward financially successful writers, that while her books “had a sound sociological basis,” they “were not profound. ”
The Times assessment notwithstanding, during her lifetime Ferber’s praises were sung by writers as diverse as Rudyard Kipling and James M.
Barrie. In 1925 she won a Pulitzer Prize, and in 1931 Columbia University conferred on her an honorary Doctor of Fetters. Yet today, she is strangely neglected. Ferber’s work has gone virtually unnoticed by feminists and multiculturalists at a time when we are busy expanding the American literary canon, recovering lost voices, and infusing varied multicultural and women’s voices into our tradition.The good news is that So Big is still as wonderful a read as it was when it was first published in 1924. Ferbers eye for detail, her ear for the spoken vernacular, and her powerful sense of setting make for entertaining and exciting reading. So Big does for us what all good novels do: it lets us escape into a virtual world; it shows us truths about ourselves; and it helps us understand our society by observing individual and community life cycles. While recreating a vivid turn'oh the century Chicago, So Big deals with surprisingly contemporary issues: poverty, Americanization, family tensions, sexism, the ambiguity of success. It is a rare achievement: a historical and a regional novel that addresses timeless concerns.
