Dawn O'Hara

A newspaperwoman, sick and broke, with a husband in an asylum she cannot divorce, goes to her sister in Milwaukee to recover and ends up back in a newsroom among the German-American brewers. Ferber was a reporter at seventeen and won the Pulitzer for So Big; this was her first novel, written while she was recovering from exactly the same collapse, and the newsroom is transcription. Sixty plates of sea and shore by Winslow Homer and John Sloan, the salt air and working light of the paintings matching the newsroom world Ferber knew firsthand.