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.