Page:So Big (1924).djvu/380

 Of course "So Big" has done more to interest people in Edna Ferber than anything else, yet the quality that has made such a success of that book lies also in most of her earlier work. That she herself was not too sure about it is made clear in an interview, titled “How it Feels to be a Best Seller":

"There are people who write Best Sellers as a matter of business. That is, they are in the Best Seller business. They write them, I am told, deliberately and mathematically, using a formula as a cook uses a recipe. You hear a name and you say, in your ignorance, ‘Who? . . . Who’s he?’ And the answer is, ‘He’s Whosis. You don’t mean to say you've never read him! He writes Best Sellers.’

“I don’t know how they do it. I don’t want to know. I suppose they have some peculiar thermometer or mechanism by which they gauge that fickle phenomenon known as the public pulse. But occasionally some one comes along who commits a Best Seller in all innocence, and with no such intent. Of such am I.

“Not only did I not plan to write a Best Seller when I wrote ‘So Big’ but I thought, when I had finished it, that I had written the world’s worst seller. Not that alone, I thought I had written a complete Non-Seller. I didn’t think anyone would ever read it. And that’s the literal truth.

“It was this way. I had worked on it, day after day, day after day, for many months, starting at nine each morning and working until four in the afternoon. I knew where I was going and why I wanted to get there, but after a time I became like a patient plodder who must travel weary miles along a lonely road before he arrives at the city of his destination. Mile after mile I covered the distance, sometimes traveling fairly swiftly, sometimes scarcely able to lift one tired foot after the other. When it was finished I was so dulled by contact with it that I scarcely could see it. The last stretch of the work, during June and July, had been written in Chicago. That June and July in Chicago I recall as a period during