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 at $3.00 a week—a rather princely salary twenty years ago for a new girl reporter in a country town. She wrote local items, from the court house, the city hall, the fire department, the home of the village Crœsus, and the police court. Then she was graduated from the Appleton paper to Milwaukee. In Milwaukee also she was a reporter. And while she was earning a living as a reporter she wrote ‘Dawn O’Hara,’ her first novel. It sold well. While it was in the press and selling during 1911 and ’12, the magazines began telling the story of ‘Emma McChesney.’ Here was something new; the traveling saleswoman—who was rather more woman than merchant, but who was altogether human. The character appealed to the public, and Edna Ferber had her knee in the door of success. In 1913 the stories were collected under the title ‘Roast Beef Medium,’ and that book sold well. Two years later appeared more McChesney stories under the title ‘Emma McChesney & Co.’ Then came the play ‘Emma McChesney,’ and Edna Ferber was well in the ante-room of the hall of fame, with her card going to posterity. In the meantime, a book of short stories, ‘Buttered Side Down,’ had been written and sold to the magazines and successfully published. In 1917 Miss Ferber’s second novel appeared, ‘Fanny, Herself,’ and in 1918 came ‘Cheerful by Request.’

“In 1922 all the promise of ten years of conscientious work was fulfilled, when Miss Ferber wrote ’The Girls,’ a novel of Chicago. The humor of it, the strength of it, the art of it, must make posterity give more than a glance at Edna Ferber’s card. She has something to tell posterity about America.

“And so we must tell posterity something about her—about Edna Ferber, herself. The best description of her family life ever written, she wrote in the dedication of ‘Dawn O’ Hara,’ to Julia Ferber, her ‘dear mother who frequently interrupts, and to Sister Fannie who says Sh-Sh-Sh- outside my door.’ Some shadowy hint of the life of the Ferbers after the husband and father died, and before the family moved to Chicago, may