So Big

Summary

Selina Peake DeJong, a cultured young woman left penniless by her father's death, marries a Dutch farmer outside Chicago and spends her life laboring on a market garden while raising her son Dirk. Ferber sets Selina's quiet idealism and love of beauty against the era's hunger for easy money and social climbing, drawing a sharp moral contrast between mother and son. The novel's warm, panoramic realism made Ferber one of the most widely read American storytellers of her generation.