Edna Ferber Stories : Arthur's Classic Novels

Edna Ferber Stories

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Cheerful--By Request
There are things about the theatre that the public does not know. A statement, at first blush, to be disputed. The press agent, the special writer, the critic, the magazines, the Sunday supplement, the divorce courts—what have they left untold? We know the make of car Miss Billboard drives; who her husbands are and were; how much the movies have offered her; what she wears, reads, says, thinks, and eats for breakfast. Snapshots of author writing play at place on Hudson; pictures of the play in rehearsal; of the director directing it; of the stage hands rewriting it—long before the opening night we know more about the piece than does the playwright himself, and are ten times less eager to see it.

Personality Plus
When men began to build cities vertically instead of horizontally there passed from our highways a picturesque figure, and from our language an expressive figure of speech. That oily-tongued, persuasive, soft-stepping stranger in the rusty Prince Albert and the black string tie who had been wont to haunt our back steps and front offices with his carefully wrapped bundle, retreated in bewildered defeat before the clanging blows of steel on steel that meant the erection of the first twenty-story skyscraper.

Half Portions
Called upon to describe Aunt Sophy you would have to coin a term or fall back on the dictionary definition of a spinster. "An unmarried woman," states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer young." That, to the world, was Sophy Decker.

One Basket [31 Stories]
Before she tried to be a good woman she had been a very bad woman--so bad that she could trail her wonderful apparel up and down Main Street, from the Elm Tree Bakery to the railroad tracks, without once having a man doff his hat to her or a woman bow.

Emma McChesney & Co.
The door marked "Mrs. Mcchesney" was closed. T. A. Buck, president of the Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, coming gaily down the hall, stopped before it, dismayed, as one who, with a spicy bit of news at his tongue's end, is met with rebuff before the first syllable is voiced. That closed door meant: "Busy. Keep out."

Dawn O'Hara The Girl Who Laughed
Some one must have been very kind, for there were doctors, and a blue-and-white striped nurse, and bottles and things. There was even a vase of perky carnations-- scarlet ones. I discovered that they had a trick of nodding their heads, saucily. The discovery did not appear to surprise me.

Roast Beef, Medium
Roast Beef, Medium! How unimaginative it sounds. How prosaic, and dry! You cast the thought of it aside with the contempt that it deserves, and you assume a fine air of the epicure as you order.

Buttered Side Down
After the glamour had worn off, and the glass slippers were worn out, did the Prince never find Cinderella's manner redolent of the kitchen hearth; and was it never necessary that he remind her to be more careful of her finger-nails and grammar? After Puss in Boots had won wealth and a wife for his young master did not that gentleman often fume with chagrin because the neighbors, perhaps, refused to call on the lady of the former poor miller's son?

Fanny Herself
It has become the fashion among novelists to introduce their hero in knee pants, their heroine in pinafore and pigtails. Time was when we were rushed up to a stalwart young man of twenty-four, who was presented as the pivot about whom the plot would revolve. Now we are led, protesting, up to a grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him through twenty years of intimate minutiae. In extreme cases we have been obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so often English), from shorts to Etons.

Roast Beef, Medium

Isle of Islay 
Lyrics of Donovan Leitch
Album: A Gift from a Flower to a Garden

How high the gulls fly
O'er Ilay
How sad the farm lad
deep in play
Felt like a grain on your sand

How well the sheep's bell
music makes
Roving the cleff
when fancy takes
Felt like a tide left me here

How blessed the forest
with birdsong
How neat the cut peat
laid so long
Felt like a seed on your land

How high the gulls fly
O'er Ilay
How sad the farm lad
deep in play
Felt like a tide left me here
Felt like a grain on your sand
Felt like a grain on your sand

For Visually Impaired see

Complete Sci-Fi
Complete Wild West Novels
Complete Horror Novels
Complete Detective Novels
Complete Children's and Fairy Tales
Complete Mystery Stories
Complete Religion
Complete British Writers
Complete Russian Writers
Complete Canadian Writers and Stories
Complete Philosophy
Complete Twentieth Century

Pages Updated On: 1-March--MMVII
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