Roast Beef Medium - Ferber, Edna

. .

Résumé :
Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Show Boat and Giant, achieved her first great success with a series of stories she published in American Magazine between 1911 and 1913. The stories featured Emma McChesney: smart, savvy, stylish, divorced mother, and Midwest traveling sales representative for T. A. Buck's Featherloom skirts and petticoats. With one hand on her sample case and the other fending off advances from salesmen, hotel clerks, and other predators, Emma holds on tightly to her reputation: honest, hardworking, and able to outsell the slickest salesman. Like her compact bag of traveling necessities, Emma has her life boiled down to essentials: her work and her seventeen-year-old son, Jock. Her experience has taught her that it's best to stick to roast beef, medium - avoiding both physical and moral indigestion - rather than experiment with fancy sauces and exotic dishes. Yet she never shies away from a challenge, and her sharp instincts and common sense serve her well in dealing with the likes of Ed Meyer, a smooth-talking, piano-playing salesman Blanche LeHay, prima donna of the Sam Levin Crackerjack Belles and T. A. Buck Jr., the wet-behind-the-ears son o trials of Emma McChesney. Published in 1917 and 1913, respectively, these books represent early steps in Ferber's journey to her 1924 Pulitzer Prize. Fanny is the semiautobiographical story of a Jewish girl growing up in the Midwest. Roast Beef is the chronicle of Emma McChesney, a divorced mother and traveling sales rep for T.A. Buck's Featherloom Skirts and Petticoats.

Biographie:
Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer, and dramatist. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical), Cimarron (1930; adapted into the 1931 film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture), Giant (1952; made into the 1956 film of the same name), and Ice Palace (1958), which was also adapted into a film in 1960. He was born on 15 August 1885 and died on 16 April 1968. She helped adapt her short tale Old Man Minick, published in 1922, into a play (Minick), which was then turned to film three times: in 1925 as the silent film Welcome Home, in 1932 as The Expert, and in 1939 as No Place to Go. Ferber was born on August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Jacob Charles Ferber, a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper, and his Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born wife, Julia (Neumann) Ferber, of German Jewish origin. The Ferbers had relocated to Kalamazoo from Chicago, Illinois, to operate a dry goods company, and her older sister Fannie was born there three years prior. Ferber's father was not a businessman, and the family moved frequently while he was growing up.