Roast Beef, Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney

By Edna Ferber

Book Overview

Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Show Boat and Giant, achieved her first great success with a series of stories she published in American Magazine between 1911 and 1913. The stories featured Emma McChesney: smart, savvy, stylish, divorced mother, and Midwest traveling sales representative for T. A. Buck's Featherloom skirts and petticoats. With one hand on her sample case and the other fending off advances from salesmen, hotel clerks, and other predators, Emma holds on tightly to her reputation: honest, hardworking, and able to outsell the slickest salesman.

Like her compact bag of traveling necessities, Emma has her life boiled down to essentials: her work and her seventeen-year-old son, Jock. Her experience has taught her that it's best to stick to roast beef, medium--avoiding both physical and moral indigestion--rather than experiment with fancy sauces and exotic dishes. Yet she never shies away from a challenge, and her sharp instincts and common sense serve her well in dealing with the likes of Ed Meyer, a smooth-talking, piano-playing salesman; Blanche LeHay, prima donna of the Sam Levin Crackerjack Belles; and T. A. Buck Jr., the wet-behind-the-ears son of the founder of Featherloom.

Roast Beef, Medium is the first of three volumes chronicling the travels and trials of Emma McChesney. The illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg, one of the most highly regarded book illustrators of the period, enhance both the humor and the vivid characterization in this wise and high-spirited tale.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0252069455
• ISBN13: 9780252069451
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

no title

Charming, light stories in chronological order about the adventures of Emma McChesney in 1913, as a traveling saleswoman for the T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoat Company. This is quite a feminist book, in spite of its good-natured humor. Each story is complete in itself, but they do follow each other in time. References to vaudeville and early movies. Emma is divorced and supporting a 17-19 year-old son. Husband was a rotter, and she accepted no support from him. She is 36-39 years old. Could be written into movie script. Ferber is the author of "Giant" and "Show Boat", the former not written til the early 50s. My copy has wonderful illustrations. The title refers to moderation in life as being the best way to survive.

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!