Personality Plus: Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock

Edna Ferber

Jan 1914 · IndyPublish.com

About this ebook

Edna Ferber, the Pulitzer Prize -- winning author of Show Boat and Giant, achieved her first great success with a series of stories featuring Emma McChesney: a smart, stylish, divorced mother who in a mere twelve years rose from stenographer to traveling sales representative to business manager and partner of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company.

In this second of three volumes chronicling the travels and trials of Emma McChesney, the plucky heroine trades in her traveling bag and coach tickets for an office and a position as T. A. Buck Jr.'s business partner. Along with this well-earned promotion comes the home -- with a fireplace -- that she had longed for during her ten years on the road.

Her dashing son, Jock, now twenty-one, has just entered the business world himself with the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company. His colleagues believe that with his heritage he "ought to be able to sell ice to an eskimo." Indeed, Jock dazzles them with his keen business sense and exemplary work ethic but goes overboard on the charm and ends up alienating clients, unnerving his boss, and even patronizing his business-savvy mother. When his company takes on the challenge of creating a zippy advertising campaign for T. A. Buck's no-frills petticoats, Jock comes through, but not without a reminder that mother always knows best.

In this bracingly modern novel, first published in 1914, Ferber contrasts the virtues of talent with those of experience to provide a fresh, readable, and smartly entertaining contest between a mother and her adult son. Personality Plus is enhanced by the drawings of James Montgomery Flagg, one of the most highly regarded book illustrators of the period.

About the author

Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Aug. 15, 1885. She spent her early career as a reporter. In 1910, Everybody's Magazine published her short story, The Homely Heroine, set in Appleton, Wisconsin. Ferber's novel, Dawn O'Hara, the story of a newspaperwoman in Milwaukee, followed in 1911. She gained national attention for her series of Emma McChesney stories, tales of a traveling underskirt saleswoman that were published in national magazines. A play based on the stories, Our Mrs. McChesney, was produced in 1915, starring Ethel Barrymore. With collaborator George S. Kaufman, Ferber wrote acclaimed plays Dinner at Eight and The Royal Family. Ferber won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for So Big, the story of a woman raising a child on a truck farm outside of Chicago. Her best known books include Show Boat, Cimarron, Giant and Ice Palace. Show Boat was made into a classic movie and Broadway musical; the film version of Cimarron, won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1931. Ferber wrote two autobiographies, A Peculiar Treasure published in 1939 and A Kind of Magic in 1963. She died of cancer on April 16, 1968.