So Big
by Edna Ferber
Summary
Selina Peake is raised on her gambler father's philosophy that life is a grand adventure, and when he is killed she takes the only respectable work going: schoolteacher in High Prairie, the Dutch truck farming country south of Chicago. On her first wagon ride in she says the cabbage fields are beautiful, and the farmers laugh at her for years. She marries one of them, Pervus DeJong, kind and hopelessly conservative, and when he dies she takes over the exhausted farm herself, a woman alone hauling vegetables to the Haymarket, and makes it pay by doing everything the neighbours told her a woman could not do.
Her son Dirk, nicknamed So Big from a nursery game, is the other half of the book. Selina wears herself to leather so that he can have architecture, beauty, the adventure her father promised her, and Dirk, grown, chooses bonds instead: a gilded career selling securities, the right clubs, the right women. The novel's judgement arrives through Dallas O'Mara, the painter Dirk cannot have, who looks at his manicured hands and sees nothing there, and through Dirk's own late glimpse of what his mother's roughened hands actually held. Ferber ends him alone in his perfect apartment, and ends Selina content in her fields, and trusts the reader to do the arithmetic.
Around three hundred and fifty pages, vivid and fast, with the market scenes the best thing in it.
Best for readers who want the great American argument between making money and making something, staged between a mother and a son.
Historical Context & Significance
So Big won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1925, and it was the bestselling American novel of 1924, selling by the hundreds of thousands within a year. Edna Ferber had doubted anyone would read it at all, asking who would want a novel about a middle aged woman in a calico dress grubbing on a truck farm south of Chicago, which remains one of the great wrong predictions in publishing.
It fixed the Ferber method: an unglamorous corner of American work rendered epic through one durable woman. She spent the next three decades applying it at scale, Show Boat in 1926, which became the Kern and Hammerstein musical, Cimarron, Saratoga Trunk, Giant, most of them bestsellers and nearly all of them filmed.
So Big itself was filmed three times: with Colleen Moore in 1924, with Barbara Stanwyck and a young Bette Davis in 1932, and with Jane Wyman in 1953, that last version softening the ending into a reconciliation the novel deliberately withholds.