To get back to name, dates, etc.: Chicago, Des Moines and Appleton, Wisconsin, all have a stake in Miss Ferber’s success. Kalamazoo doesn’t vociferate. It doesn’t have to, for she was born there and though seven cities claimed Homer dead it will be no use for seven or eight or six places to claim Edna Ferber living. Kalamazoo will see to that; Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she made her debut--the only debut that’s really worth making--on August 15, 1887. That is why we shall speak of her very respectfully. She is a month older than we are and a month is everything. The daughter of Jacob Charles Ferber and Julia (Neuman) Ferber. Educated in the public and high schools of--alas for Kalamazoo!--Appleton, Wisconsin. At seventeen she became a reporter on the Appleton _Daily Crescent_--“the youngest real reporter in the world.” She has it on us. We were almost nineteen when--but never mind. Appleton, we hear, soon became too small for Miss Ferber. Appletons have a way of doing that, or isn’t it rather that the Edna Ferbers have a way of growing too big for the Appletons? Anyway, Miss Ferber went to Milwaukee and then to a big Chicago daily, the _Tribune_, to be exact. In Milwaukee she worked on the _Journal_. _Dawn O’Hara_, her first book, was written in the time she could spare from newspaper work. After it was completed she did not like it. It was her mother who rescued the manuscript from the wastebasket and sent it to a publisher, the same person mentioned in the dedication of the novel: “To my dear mother who frequently interrupts and to my sister Fannie who says ‘Sh-sh-sh!’ outside my door.” The best piece of work Mrs. Ferber ever did! The book took publisher and public by storm. It came out in 1911 and in the same year the new American author attained the dignity of twenty-four years. Our copy of _Dawn O’Hara_ is marked “eighth edition,” but as it is a reprinted copy that may understate, or rather under-indicate, the book’s success. A few thousands one way or another hardly matters among so many thousands of copies sold! Without pressing the autobiographical idea too hard it is perfectly evident that much of the background of _Dawn O’Hara_ is from Miss Ferber’s own experience, notably the settings in Milwaukee. How she could ever have been so dissatisfied with her story as to discard it utterly any present-day reader will be puzzled to imagine. It is extremely well told. It is full of the perfect human--humorously human--quality which lifts so many of Miss Ferber’s short stories into high place. Take this passage: