Dawn O'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed

1911 · Book · Edna Ferber

"Well, one does not seek a divorce from a husband who is insane," Dawn O'Hara observes early in this tale. Love, madness and newspapers are themes of this book. Midwestern-born Dawn has become a New York newspaperwoman and wife of a star reporter, but her husband goes insane. Eventually exhausted and hospitalized herself, Dawn is taken home to Wisconsin to rebuild her health, her life and her career. Along the way there is a handsome German doctor. (Younger readers may need to be reminded that this book was written before both wars with Germany.) Edna Ferber began her own newspaper career right after high school and was 26 when she published this first novel. (Her later works won a Pulitzer Prize and a "Best Picture" Oscar, among other honors.) She had quit daily journalism, younger than her heroine, to write this tale of a 28-year-old "yellow wreck of a newspaper reporter," who is also writing her first book. Ferber draws on her own newspaper experiences and Wisconsin years to describe places and people in colorful detail. Avoiding too much autobiography, she makes the heroine Irish (Ferber was Jewish) and her doctor German, in both cases taking risks with ethnic-dialect-writing that may seem dated. Ferber also makes her heroine a wife, while the author herself never married. While Dawn's love for the book's two leading men is the main soap-opera plot, there's another love story here, as suggested in this passage: "After you have been a newspaper writer for seven years -- and loved it -- you will be a newspaper writer, at heart and by instinct at least, until you die. There's no getting away from it. It's in the blood. Newspaper men have been known to inherit fortunes, to enter politics, to write books and become famous, to degenerate into press agents and become infamous, to blossom into personages, to sink into nonentities, but their news-nose remained a part of them, and the inky, smoky, stuffy smell of a newspaper office was ever sweet in their nostrils." by Edna Ferber