So Big

Edna Ferber’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel opens with Selina Peake, a cultured young woman who takes a teaching post in the Dutch farming settlement of High Prairie, outside Chicago. She marries a stolid vegetable farmer, is widowed young, and learns to work the truck farm herself, all while raising the son she nicknames So Big. Selina holds fast to a belief that life should hold beauty as well as labor. Her boy Dirk, though, grows up chasing money and status as a bond salesman, and the gap between his mother’s values and his ambitions becomes the novel’s quiet ache. Ferber writes with warmth about work, land, and the cost of trading art for comfort. Free to read in PDF and EPUB.