Hardcover Nonfiction

by Edna Ferber · Doubleday, Doran

Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber's stunning first autobiography, in which she recounts her small-town Midwestern childhood and rise to literary fame, all amidst the backdrop of America around the turn of the 20th century. A modest girl growing up one of the only Jewish children in her Midwestern town, Edna Ferber started overcoming the odds at a young age. Pursuing work at the local newspaper as an innocent 17-year-old, she was assigned the night court shift, reporting on drugs and violence, and gradually finding her own voice in standing up to what she witnessed. As she continued to pursue writing, she recalls the various ways in which she found inspiration, leading her to publish her first books and later, So Big, which won a Pulitzer Prize and catapulted her to fame. Ferber's incredible experiences all occur during a time of pre-WWII rising anti-Semitism and the gaining power of Hitler in Europe, and the various historical and political tensions of the time color the fascinating events of her life.

by Richard E. Byrd · Putnam

by Pierre van Paassen · Hillman-Curl

by Margaret Halsey · Simon & Schuster

by Bertha Damon · Simon & Schuster

The is mainly the story of the Miss Damon's New England grandmother, Grandma Griswold, who fought the twentieth century and all its innovations single-handed--and won. A disciple of Thoreau, she believed in plain living and high thinking, exalting the soul by mortifying the flesh. While raising the two little girls orphaned by her daughter's death, she became the focus of an unusual New England country childhood. She dominates the landscape of home, school, and play with a personality--which in Miss Damon's depiction of it walks with something of majesty--that emerges as a figure of significance in the pattern of American life. Stern, rigid, and intolerant, set in her ways, just and self-denying and noble all at once, she deserves a wide circle of acquaintances.

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh · Harcourt, Brace