Fanny Herself

A Jewish girl in a Wisconsin town runs her dead mother's store, then goes to Chicago and rises in a mail-order house by being better at it than the men — and by putting away everything she came from. Ferber was a reporter at seventeen and won the Pulitzer for So Big; Show Boat, Cimarron and Giant all began as her novels. The price of assimilation is the real subject, and she does not pretend it was cheap. Sixty plates of American winters by painters such as Robert Henri and George Inness, from 1827 to 1925, match the cold remove of a woman who remakes herself.