"As

S a child I wanted to be an actress. I've always wanted to be an actress. I'm not a writer at all", said Miss Ferber; but in that same week "So Big", one year after its publication, sold three thousand copies, carrying its total distribution well on toward two hundred thousand. The popularity of this novel of mother love is romantic for more than one reason. It entails a story of struggle and ultimate success, a story which is always dear to the heart of an American, no matter how sophisticated he may be. It tells also the story of artistic achievement. Whatever critics may think of Miss Ferber's work, and some of them rank it high, she has progressed steadily, she has selected, eliminated, forced herself to follow a standard, and raised that standard as the years have passed. The bushy haired, dark eyed little tomboy whose family had moved from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Appleton, Wisconsin, when she was very young, whose great dream was to attend the Northwestern School of Expression, has become the successful, poised woman of striking appearance who keeps herself in trim for her writing much as an athlete prepares for a race, who goes to her desk every morning to work, who says that she would not give up her six years of newspaper experience for a similar period of study in any university in the world.

As a child, she says, she was a great "piece speaker"! Her greatest joy was to find an audience before which

she could perform. Upon occasion she was taken to Chicago to visit Grandmother. The rest of the family would gather on the front steps along Calumet Avenue. "Where is 'Pete'?" someone would ask "Pete" was her father's name for her. Then there would be a wild search, and "Pete" would be found on some corner, an admiring crowd of kids gathered round, content, exuding dramatic power, speaking pieces to her heart's desire.

The Ryan High School of Appleton was her alma mater. Before high school days, even, she had loved school. "When I woke in the morning to find that it was Saturday, it was almost unbearable", she says. "Fridays were the great days; those were the piece speaking days when we went around from room to room, saying our poems to each other."

So far, though she had organized amateur theatricals where violent dramas were given on improvised stages before audiences happy after the payment of the requisite number of pins, she had never wanted to write. All her imagination and desire were directed toward the stage. Yet she read, read avidly, everything she found. At nine, she read all of Dickens. Why? Because there was a full set of Dickens at home in the old walnut bookcase. Then followed "Hypatia", "Quo Vadis", George Eliot.

"My prize possession", she told me, 'was a large green volume called 'The World of Wit and Humor'. If there

is any humor in my work, I owe it to that volume. In it were selections from Washington Irving, from Artemus Ward. I have it still, and the pages are worn and broken at the binding."

Presently she discovered the library, and took away two and three books at a time. One of the most tragic days of her life was that on which she finished her quota of books, took them back, and found that she could not borrow more until the sun had set and risen again. She was not entirely a bookish young lady, however. She climbed trees with the best boys in the town, played games, and was as independent as a hawk.

Evenings at home form a vivid part of her memory-sitting hunched up in a chair with a book, reading to her father, who was blind, whom she adored. Going to him sometimes, when his head ached, and with strong, firm fingers rubbing away the pain. The story of these early days, much of it, is found in the first part of "Fanny Herself". Miss Ferber's mother also tells of them, the kindly, gay, youthful mother who lives with her in an apartment looking out over Central Park.

Beaux there were, too, in plenty; twice a week she tramped off to a dance. Always, when she wasn't reading, she was active, and always, while she was active, she was acting. "Even now", she says, "I'd rather see a good play than do anything else, and I'd rather see a bad play than no play at all!"

Small things change the course of ambition. In the case of every writer of best sellers I have considered, that obvious truth has been proved. Miss Ferber had been the editor of the Ryan High School paper; but the idea of literature as a career had not occurred to her. It was some little family quarrel over pin money, as a matter of fact that made her give up her idea

of going to the School of Expression and march down to the offices of the Appleton "Daily Crescent", sign a contract at the age of seventeen to work as a reporter at three dollars a week.

The girl reporter on a paper, no matter how small, learns much of life. She collects news at the dry goods store and the post office, from the lounger on the street corner and the gossip in the parlor. Miss Ferber was a good reporter, and she took her work so seriously that presently she was made local correspondent for several papers, among them the Milwaukee "Journal". Meanwhile, her sister Fannie kept house for the blind father and the hard working mother, the same sister Fannie who has since become Mrs. Fox and has written an excellent cookbook to prove that early training counts.

The woman reporter of the Milwaukee "Journal" was sick. The editor was at a loss to replace her. Then he remembered having heard of this young lady in Appleton, remembered her copy as good, and sent for her. Miss Ferber left home with the assurance and innocence of youth, and came to be a regular "sob sister" on the great city paper.

She arrived puzzled, naive, with everything to learn. Her first assignment was on the famous Schandain case, a scandal trial filled with events whose import meant little to her. Yet she sat and drank it in, seemed to understand, turned in her copy at the end of the day. Those were the days of swift newspaper writing and of grinding work at impossible hours.

"Hey, kid, d'you think we're getting out a weekly!" was the cry of the desk. Copy would be ripped from the typewriter as it was being written. The girl covered street and morgue. She remembers nights in police court, when

the filth of the streets was swept in to be judged. "Thirty dollars! Thirty days! Thirty days! Thirty days!" Flocks of white, mottled faces, hard, tired, despairing, gay! Again, the girl didn't know what it was all about, but she remembers clearly one incident. A court attendant, with years of gross experience, fat, worldly wise, sat beside her.

"They look so tired!" said the girl reporter. "Aw well, they get their money!" he threw back. She swung around at him, looked at him with those great dark eyes, and scarcely knowing why she said it, snapped out, "Well, I guess they earn it!”

Now Miss Ferber read O. Henry and "The Saturday Evening Post". Miriam Michelson's "A Yellow Journalist" was running as a serial. It was the story of a girl reporter.

"I dramatized myself as its heroine", says Miss Ferber. "I hung around the office waiting for assignments. I wrote and wrote night and day!"

Before her, on the "Journal", had been Zona Gale, whose name was whispered as that of a goddess, the beautiful young lady who had gone east to New York and had stormed that stern citadel with success. One day, in pink flounces and a picture hat, Miss Gale came to pay a visit to her old office. Miss Ferber, banging away at her typewriter, did not meet her; but she overheard a conversation at the next desk which had a vital bearing on later events.

"If you want to write, and then want to sell what you've written," asked someone of the successful Miss Gale, "what do you do with it?"

"Send it to an agent", replied Miss Gale, mentioning the name.

Then one day, overstrung in nerve and overreaching in ambition, the girl reporter fainted away. The strain was too much. She went home for a two

weeks' rest and stayed there. Yet even in the midst of a breakdown she could not be idle. She went out, bought herself a second hand typewriter for seventeen dollars, and started writing her first novel.

"I always work from a character", she will tell you now, and it was from her own experiences as a reporter that she fashioned her first novel "Dawn O'Hara". She held it of little importance, but her mother convinced her that it was worth a try. How did one sell a novel? What did one do with a thing when it was written? She remembered Zona Gale. She wrote her. "What was the name of the person to whom one sends things when they are written?" she asked. "It was a funny name, something to do with flowers."

It turned out to be Flora May Holly, and to Miss Holly went the first manuscript, which was promptly sold to Frederick A. Stokes for book publication. Before it appeared, however, she had turned to the short story; and from the start her tales were excellent in form and content. Turn to "Buttered Side Down" and you will find the first one, "The Homely Heroine". It was a good story. It still is! She I wrote it in the shed at the side of her home, a shed that she remembers well, with trees brushing against it outside, and spiders, plenty of them, within. Her father had died, and they were selling furniture and household effects preparatory to moving to Chicago.

"How much is this beautiful almost brand new bedstead?"

Rattle-rattle-rattle on the typewriter. "Why, this table cloth is spotless and of very good quality!" Rattle-rattle

is created.

and a new heroine

She sent her first short story to "Everybody's", because there lay a copy on the living room table. It was

accepted. She remembers seeing her mother coming up the street waving the letter with the check in it. Sixty five dollars! She was grieved. It had been a good story. That wasn't enough. The next one went to "The American Magazine". A hundred dollars. That was better!

From then on, if writing is ever easy, it was easy for Miss Ferber. She discovered Emma McChesney. When she wrote her first story of a woman salesman, she had no idea of the proportions the character would take. This ideal of the modern business woman took the public fancy. All the magazines wanted Emma. For a time many of them had her. Yet the real turning point in Miss Ferber's career was perhaps the moment when she refused to sign a long contract with the "Cosmopolitan" for more and more and more again of Emma. Her whole career has been characterized by this effort not to become artistically stagnant, to do better and better work. She surveys everything she does with a coldly appraising glance, although I know that she loves the things she writes dearly. In each of her collected volumes of stories she has advanced. "The Girls", while in some ways a better book than "So Big", hasn't the deep emotional quality, the peculiarly accurate understanding, that make Selina an unforgetable character.

When she had finished "So Big" she thought it a failure. She was overcome with a sense of inferiority, so much so that she did not know whether she should publish it at all. Her publishers reassured her, and the critics were not far behind, then the public added its unflagging approval.

How does she write? Since she has moved from Chicago to New York she has taken a studio, where she goes every morning.

"Do you like to have people telephone you at your studio?" I heard a friend ask.

"Do I like to have them?" she laughed, with one of her amazing dramatic gestures. "I sit there longing and longing for someone to call.”

Yet that is not really true. She, like all other writers worth their salt, suffers while she writes, wonders, works, wonders again. Is it good? Is it bad? Why do I go on writing when it is so hard? Yet they go on, and it is good, just as long as they feel that way about it and, I think, only that long. When it has become easy, the flame dies.

Miss Ferber works direct on a typewriter. How otherwise, after those six years of newspaper work? A first draft, random collection of notes and incidents centring around a character; a second, nearer story form; and a third with the polishing accomplished.

When I saw her last she was deeply engrossed in the composition of her new novel of Chicago. I have watched many actresses during rehearsal periods; they are nervous, alternately despairing and elated. Likewise Miss Ferber.

These characters of hers, from where do they spring? They are largely intuitive, she will tell you. "I have never known a Selina. I have never been to the Haymarket in Chicago at night. It was one of the things I always intended to do and never did." Yet how real the scene where Selina takes her vegetables to market! Besides, Miss Ferber's a member of the Market Association of America, and that proves the truth of her background, doesn't it? Like many creative artists she has the power of sympathetic and acquisitive imagination. Masefield saw a fox hunt, once, and he has written a poem, "Reynard the Fox", which experts say is the greatest

written account of an age old sport. What to study? What to know? What to write? It is a question, in the end, of being, not of knowing!

"Isn't it a pity", said Miss Ferber, who is after all one of the youngest of our very successful women writers, "that, after we reach old age and are just beginning to know a craft, just able to write of life fully, we must be cut off? It would be so wonderful if we could begin over again, learn another craft; say, 'I have been a writer, now I will learn to act!""

Her plays have not really satisfied her longing for the theatre, although both "Our Mrs. McChesney", written with George V. Hobart, and "Minick", written with George S. Kaufman, have been successful. She is still the girl who dreams of being an actress. After an evening in which she has told you of how she learned to write, or as she will undoubtedly put it is learning, she still says, "I have always wanted to be an actress. I am no writer at all!”

And she would have been a fine actress, just as she is a fine writer.