Cimarron

WINNER OF THE ACADEMY AWARD FOR BEST PICTURE OF 1931

Edna Ferber’s Cimarron is a sweeping epic of love, ambition, and change set against the fevered rush for Oklahoma land in the late nineteenth century. When dashing Yancey and Sabra Cravat set out to stake their claim in the territory before it becomes a state, they find themselves at the heart of a society in the making, brimming with hope, prejudice, opportunity, and loss.

A runaway bestseller on its original release and later adapted into the 1931 Academy Award-winning film, Cimarron captures the restless energy of a country inventing itself and the quiet resolve of a complicated woman unexpectedly finding her voice within it. Ferber’s vigorous and strikingly modern storytelling reveals both the promise and the compromises of the American dream. With a new introduction and an extensive biographical timeline.

Edna Ferber (1885–1968) was a bestselling American author of thirteen novels, an accomplished playwright, and a prolific writer of short fiction. Several of her books, including Cimarron, Saratoga Trunk, and Giant, were adapted into major motion pictures, while Show Boat became the landmark Kern and Hammerstein Broadway musical. With George S. Kaufman she co-wrote the enduringly popular plays Dinner at Eight, The Royal Family, and Stage Door. A proud Jewish American and a member of New York’s Algonquin Round Table, Ferber brought a socially acute, often satiric intelligence to her immensely popular work, helping to shape America’s sense of itself for much of the twentieth century.

Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University and has received Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowships. Among his other books, he has written new introductions to a wide range of classic books by such authors as Shelley, Austen, Brontë, Dickinson, Woolf, von Arnim, Sackville-West, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway.