Cimarron

Edna Ferber opens with the wild land rush of 1889 and rides Oklahoma’s growth across forty years, from raw frontier town to oil-rich state. At the center are Yancey Cravat, a magnetic, restless lawyer and adventurer forever chasing the next horizon, and his wife Sabra, who stays behind to build a newspaper, raise a family, and hold a community together. Ferber uses their marriage to trace the making of the American West, with a clear eye for the greed, courage, and prejudice mixed into it. Published in 1929, the novel was a huge success and became the basis for the Academy Award winning film. It is a broad, spirited saga of ambition and settlement. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available to download.