Roast Beef, Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney
Author: Edna Ferber, Lawrence R. Rodgers, James Montgomery Flagg
List Price: $14.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0252069455
Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr (Trd) (May, 2001)
Sales Rank: 453,930
Average Customer Rating: 4 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 4 out of 5
Ferber never goes out of date
I bought this reprint because of the James Montgomery Flagg illustrations, but I enjoyed the story a great deal. Emma is a "drummer" in her mid-30s, an agent to retail stores throughout the Midwest of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. She's a woman in what was, before the Great War, decidedly a man's world, but she beats most of them at it all hollow. She's claimed to be the first businesswoman in American literature and she serves as a mouthpiece for Ferber's feminist politics and her Progressive attitude toward the commercial world. This was the first of three collections (all made up of stories serialized in magazines) and they were immensely popular in their day -- especially with women, though Theodore Roosevelt was a fan. too. In fact, Emma was Ferber's first real hit and paved the way for her prolific later career. The style, of course, tends somewhat to effusive overwriting, but you get the same in almost any popular literature written at the turn of the century. Good stuff!
Book Index