So Big (Perennial Classics) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Until he was almost ten the name stuck to him..." (more)
Key Phrases: west sixteen, garden truck, truck farmer, High Prairie, Pervus Dejong, Klaas Pool (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A masterpiece...It has the completeness, [the] finality, that grips and exalts and convinces." -- --Literary Review

"A novel to read and to remember." -- --New York Times

Product Description

Winner of the 1924 Pulitzer Prize, So Big is widely regarded as Edna Ferber's crowning achievement.A rollicking panorama of Chicago's high and low life, this stunning novel follows the travails of gambler's daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Later Printing edition (August 22, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060956690
• ISBN-13: 978-0060956691
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #97,720 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pulitzer Prize Winner, August 25, 2000

By	Z*lda (Dubuque, IA USA) - See all my reviews

Without a doubt, _So Big_ is the best of all Edna Ferber's novels, and it was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer prize. It contains a strong portrayal of early 20th century midwestern agricultural life, which Ferber borrowed from her observations as a young women in Appleton, Wisconsin.

_So Big_ is the story of Dirk DeJong, and his mother Selina. After a colorful and tragic girlhood, she arrived as a schoolteacher in a Dutch farming community south of Chicago. She didn't quite fit in with the narrow-minded farmers and their overworked wives, yet she married a handsome farmer with notoriously unproductive land.

After his early death, she spends the next decades finding a market and coaxing a crop to grow in soggy land. By the time Dirk grows up, the "DeJong asparagus" is a success, and it enables his banking career. Yet he loses a sense of empathy and beauty, which Selina retains, despite her difficult path in life.

Ferber is the author who wrote _Show Boat_ and _Giant_. She could grind out popular dramatic fiction with loads of stock characters in a sentimentalized historic setting. But her later work loses the art found in _So Big_, which is peopled with multi-dimensional characters and a story which touches the reader's heart.

I highly recommend this book.

44 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Single motherhood at the turn of the last century, December 13, 2000

By	John P. Stamper "A Searcher" (Central Florida) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

An interesting story of a woman's life and her struggle to raise her only son and teach him what is valuable in life. The Story is set in the late 1800 and early 1900's in rural and urban Chicago. The author called it "a book about cabbages..." but really, it's a story about Selina DeJong, orphaned as a young, wealthy child, who struggles to make a life for herself and her only child Dirk whom she has nicknamed "sobig". She marries a dolt for a husband and begins to work on a farm. Her husband is a small man with a small brain and is afraid of his own shadow which limits and frustrates Selina and keeps her from accomplishing anything for many years. Fortunately, her husband suffers an accidental death and she is fianlly able to make some necessary improvements which allow her son (who otherwise would have been a cabbage farmer his whole life) to attend college in the city. He succeeds in college, but when he gets out he sacrifices his dream profession(architecture) to make a lot of money doing something boring in finance, and in doing so, he misses the point his mother tried to teach him about success. (i.e. that money doesn't equal it.) This is a really good book with a wonderful and inspiring ending. If the whole book had been as good as the last couple chapters, I would have given it five stars easily. Although "So Big" isn't a famous book, Edna Ferber made it big with most of her others... You may have heard of a couple of them... "Giant" from which the Rock Hudson, James Dean film was made, and "Showboat", which was made into a sprawling musical. (My head aches just to think about it).

31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excelent and inspiring Pulitzer Prize winning novel, January 7, 2001

By A Customer

I loved this book. I am currently reading through the Pulitzer Prize winning novels and this is one of my favorites to date! The story reminds one of who you want to be - one who is strong, principaled and loving. The main charachter is a woman who faces virtually every challange that life has to offer and who still remains an individual of hope and direction. I thought that the novel was inspiring. The prose and the themes were engaging and very readable. The book reminds us to push on an be the people that we know that we can be.

A great inspiring book - read it.