What title won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction a hundred years ago, in 1925? So Big, by Edna Ferber, of course. It featured Dutch Americans.

The Prize

You’re forgiven if you’ve not heard of the book. The fiction market of 1924 was as tepid as the two principal candidates for president that year (Calvin Coolidge and John W. Davis, with the eminent Progressive Robert M. LaFollette netting one vote in six as a third-party candidate), so Ferber’s novel faced no sterner competition than Zane Grey’s latest, Call of the Canyon, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s twin-pack, Tarzan and the Ant Men and The Land That Time Forgot. One true classic did appear that year, Melville’s Billy Budd, but perhaps because it’s a novella or had been finished in 1891 or was issued in a hasty and faulty edition, the Pulitzer people did not give it the recognition it has today.

So Big would not have stood a chance had it arrived a year later, for 1925 is a high-water mark in U.S. literary history: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. All these lost out for the 1926 Pulitzer, in one of its prize committee’s several demonstrations of foolishness, to Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.

The Author

You’ve probably not heard of the author, either, a testimony to the fleeting nature of fame. Edna Ferber was big stuff on the American cultural scene from the 1920s through the ‘50s. She followed up So Big with Show Boat the next year, and its adaptation to the Broadway stage by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein the year after that pointed to her lasting success. Her stage plays, screen plays, and novels adapted to both make up a stellar list: among others, Cimarron, Dinner at Eight, Stage Door, Saratoga Trunk, and Giant. She kept smart company too, being a regular at Manhattan’s legendary Algonquin Round Table of eminent writers, critics, and producers who enjoyed exchanging barbed wit over daily lunch.

It was a long way from Kalamazoo, where Ferber was born in 1885 to German and Hungarian Jewish parents. The family followed her ne’er do well shopkeeper father back to Chicago, then on to small-town Iowa and eventually Appleton, Wisconsin where Edna graduated from high school and started as a newspaper reporter. She moved up to a Milwaukee paper, then on to publishing short stories and eventually her breakthrough novel, So Big.

The Movie

So Big itself made the screen three times—once immediately; next in 1932, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis; and once more in 1953 with Sterling Hayden and Jane Wyman. Again, contemporaneous works have proved more enduring. Porgy by Dubose Heyward appeared in 1925, to be rendered immortal a decade later by Dorothy Heyward, the author’s wife, and George Gershwin as Porgy and Bess.For that matter Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a 1925 international bestselling novel, far outdistanced So Big on the silver screen, courtesy of co-stars Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell and Howard Hawks’s direction. 

The Novel

So Big is titled from the nickname given to Dirk DeJong by his mother, Selina Peake DeJong, who would ask her precious baby, “How big is my man?” “Soooo big!” (3) But Selina is clearly the star of the show. Reared by a widowed father, an epicurean gambling man, Selina wanders the country with him, educating herself on books found in boarding house libraries. Sharp as a whip, she absorbs literature and theater both classic and light and begins to envision a life of Art and Beauty, while her father enjoins her just to enjoy the daily adventure of life.

Alas, Simeon gets caught in a misadventure—errant gunfire in a Chicago gambling den—leaving Selina a 19-year-old orphan with a little money but plenty of grit. She sets out to teach school at the nearby truck-farming village of High Prairie, later known as Roseland—in both iterations populated by Hollanders.

Ferber purportedly took inspiration for her heroine from the real-life Antje Paarlberg of South Holland (“Low Prairie”), Illinois, but So Big’s pictureof Dutch-American culture and character is superficial and one-sided. It especially suffers from Ferber’s being religiously tone-deaf. The local Reformed church is a fleeting presence in the story, and only a couple of worship services make the pages—enough for just one week in real life! The community is fully absorbed in making house, making a crop, making (at first very little) money, and making matches among the young folk so as to replicate its stolid life going forward. The highs and lows of Dutch Calvinism as lived out in immigrant communities—the everyday piety, the gossip and maneuvers, the theological commitment and quarrels, the mutual aid, the deep dives into life’s big questions—none of it appears here.

The All-American Girl

But if So Big is only nominally a Dutch American story, it is a consummately American one. Ferber’s work consistently features strong women like herself, and Selina is a model of the type. She falls for a studly doofus, Pervus DeJong, but is soon chafing at his unbudging ways and lack of imagination. Conveniently, he works himself to death, leaving her with baby Dirk and a few swampy acres. But Selina is full of vision and enterprise and soon has improved the land and diversified her crops. The material rewards of her pluck are sweet enough but not as great as the joys of independence and self-reliance.  

Thus, So Big executes a feminist turn on the classic American trope of the self-made man—complete with a rich benefactor (here, a thinly disguised version of Philip Armour of meat-packing fame) who detects the hero’s character and provides her with critical financial aid. But Ferber also makes a point of Selina’s New England heritage, all verve and determination in contrast to Dutch lethargy and stoicism. We have then another iteration of the Yankee schoolmarm as savior—think Kay Adams (!) in The Godfather and Molly Stark Wood, descendant of a Revolutionary War hero, in Owen Wister’s primordial Western, The Virginian (1902).

Appraisals

Yet all these women encountered limits to their influence. In Selina’s case it is the disappointing turn taken by son Dirk. She yearns for him to pick up her forsaken mantle of Art and Beauty, but he instead pursues the big bucks of bond salesman and a callow socialite who had married for money. It is a surrogate son, Roelf Pool, from the family she had boarded with in High Prairie, who fulfills her dream, returning to Chicago as an accomplished artist in Paris. As the book ends, he is happy, and she in him, while Dirk is left weeping bitterly in his lonely room.

Ferber’s ultimate target thus turns out to be 1920s materialism and business culture. In that, So Big presents the antithesis to another 1925 bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows by Bruce Barton—that man being Jesus, the Greatest Businessman Ever! Her secondary object of concern, Dutch America c. 1900, earned a more mixed assessment: “A cold people, yet kindly,” Selena reflects. “Suspicious, yet generous. Distrustful of all change, yet progressing by sheer force of thrift and unceasing labour. Unimaginative for generations, only to produce—a Roelf Pool.” (222)

I will leave it to your judgment, gentle reader, as to how accurate that judgment remains.