To the Editor:

I would like to express my surprise and displeasure at . . . the review of Edna Ferber’s book One Basket by Lillian B. McCall (September). The reviewer has ridiculed every aspect of Edna Ferber’s writing—the assumptions, the values, the language. According to Miss McCall, none of the short stories displays imagination, or interest, or charm. This puts one in a quandary; just why were Edna Ferber’s books and short stories read so widely, as we know they were.

Miss Ferber did not aim for the intellectual audience. She was obviously a spokesman for the more or less illiterate middle class, criticizing them on their own ground, for their own consumption. The sophistication of her own intellectual aims was not great, as one can see, for example, in So Big, the Bible of the 10th-grade English class. Edna Ferber’s readers enjoyed her pedestrian romanticism and the “honest” color and movement of her stories. No one feels bound to claim that she is a profound writer, or that her language has great originality or power. . . . In my opinion, Miss McCall owes the book another review based on a standard to be found somewhere in the vicinity of Edna Ferber’s aims and audience.

Elsa Shatzkin
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

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