Fanny Herself 
      by Edna Ferber

      Fanny Herself is the intensely personal chronicle of a young girl growing up Jewish in a small midwestern town. Packed with the warmth and the wry, sidelong wit that made Ferber one of the best-loved writers of her time.

Introduction by Lawrence R. Rodgers

Heralded by one reviewer as "the most serious, extended and dignified of [Edna] Ferber's books," Fanny Herself is the intensely personal chronicle of a young girl growing up Jewish in a small midwestern town. Packed with the warmth and the wry, sidelong wit that made Ferber one of the best-loved writers of her time, the novel charts Fanny's emotional growth through her relationship with her mother, the shrewd, sympathetic Molly Brandeis.

Ambivalent about being Jewish, self-deprecating toward her gift for sketching and drawing, and inspired as a businesswoman, Fanny strives to carve out her sense of herself. She is accompanied on her journey by impeccably drawn characters such as Father Fitzpatrick, the Catholic priest in Winnebago; Ella Monahan, buyer for the glove department of the Haynes-Cooper mail order house; and Clarence Heyl, the scrappy columnist who never forgot how Fanny rescued him from the school bullies.

Through Fanny's honest struggle with conflicting values--financial security and corporate success versus altruism and artistic integrity--Ferber grapples with some of the most deeply embedded contradictions of the American spirit.

Edna Ferber (1887-1968) was a journalist and author whose best-known works include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big and the novels that were made into the musical Showboat and the movies Giant and Cimarron.

Lawrence R. Rodgers, an associate professor of English at Kansas State University, is the author of Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel.

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