Edna Farmer: Farmer In the Dell

Written by Edna Ferber

Narrated by philip chenevert

You can take the farm boy out of the rural area and send him to the big city, but you cannot take the farm out of the boy. Edna Ferber tells here of the farm boy who grew up into a smart man who moved to the city because farm work was just ridiculously too hard. But perhaps the city life is not as great as he was led to believe; and perhaps the city job just does not answer some deep need in him to feel the soil in his fingers and to watch things grow. What will he do? He knows the pain and uncertainty and misery of farm life so is that even an option for a smart man? Listen and find out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Philip Chenevert
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9798868773037

Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber (1885-1968) was an American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Jewish parents, Ferber was raised in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Economic hardship and antisemitism made their family a tight knit one as they moved constantly throughout Edna’s youth. At 17, she gave up her dream of studying to be an actor to support her family, finding work at the Appleton Daily Crescent and the Milwaukee Journal as a reporter. In 1911, while recovering from anemia, Ferber published her debut novel, Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed, earning a reputation as a rising star in American literature. In 1925, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel So Big, which follows a young woman from a suburb of Chicago who takes a job as a teacher in a rural town. She followed up her critically acclaimed bestseller with the novel Show Boat (1926), which was adapted into a popular musical by Oscar Hammerstein and P. G. Wodehouse the year after its release. Several of her books became successful film and theater productions—So Big served as source material for a 1932 movie starring Barbara Stanwick, George Brent, and Bette Davis, which was remade in 1953 with Jane Wyman in the lead role. Ferber spent most of her life in New York City, where she became a member of the influential Algonquin Round Table group. In the leadup to the Second World War, Ferber supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was a fierce critic of Hitler and antisemitism around the world.