Referberation

AMERICAN BEAUTY -- Edna Ferber -- Doubleday, Doran ($2.50)./-

As purely popular authors get more & more established, they feel it behooves them to justify their popularity by infusing their entertainment with a Message. American Beauty's Message: from the mixture in the U. S. melting pot of inbred aristocracy and peasant stock will come a new & nobler breed. But you do not have to pay attention to Edna Ferber's Message to enjoy her story.

True Baldwin, Chicago tycoon, has reached breakdown-time. His daughter Candace lures him on a vacation back to Connecticut where he was once a farmer boy. As they motor along, they like the countryside, deprecate the ubiquitous Polacks. They find the old house where True's first love, Judith Oakes, used to live. They fall in love with and want to buy it on the spot. The owner, a young New-England-looking man, says his name is Orrange Olszak. Curtain.

The story jumps back to 1700, shows the original Orrange Oakes building the house, living in it in ancestral splendor. Then you skip to 1890. Judith Oakes, last of her clan, is an embittered spinster, mistress of a decrepit estate. The old settlers are vanishing, the Poles are coming in. When Judith discovers that her niece has married the Polack hired man she dies of a stroke. When Death comes for his parents, Orrange Olszak struggles on with the farm. The story comes down to the present again. The Baldwins have arrived at just the right time : Orrange was beginning to get desperate. Now all will be well: old True will buy the place, keep Orrange on as manager; Candace will probably marry him.

The Author. Edna Ferber, short (5 ft. 3 in.), Jewish, unmarried, was born in Kalamazoo, Mich., lives in Manhattan but likes Chicago best. She started newspaper work at 17, sold her first story when she was 23 (she is now 44). A plugger herself, she likes to write about workers. Her two ambitions: "To sit in a rocking-chair at the corner of State & Madison streets [Chicago] and watch the folks go by"; "to live on a houseboat in the Vale of Cashmere." Author of many a short story, co-author (with George S. Kaufman) of two Broadway-produced plays, she has also written : Dawn O'Hara, Fanny Herself, The Girls, So Big, Showboat, Cimarron (TIME, March 24, 1930).

/-Published Oct. 15.

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