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"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."
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
newspapers, journalism, romance, newspaperwomen, insanity, Fiction, generalTimes
1900-1910Showing 10 featured editions. View all 10 editions?
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01
Dawn O\'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed
July 12, 2006, BiblioBazaar
Paperback
in English
1426404808 9781426404801
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02
Dawn O\'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed (Large Print Edition)
July 12, 2006, BiblioBazaar
Paperback
in English
1426405235 9781426405235
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03
Dawn O'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed
January 2004, Wildside Press
Hardcover
in English
0809595486 9780809595488
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04
Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed
March 1, 2004, Wildside Press
Paperback
in English
080959420X 9780809594207
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05
Dawn O'hara The Girl Who Laughed
June 30, 2004, Kessinger Publishing
Paperback
in English
1419115251 9781419115257
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06
Dawn O'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed
March 2003, IndyPublish.com
Paperback
in English
1404347135 9781404347137
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07
Dawn O'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed
March 2003, IndyPublish.com
Hardcover
in English
1404347127 9781404347120
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08 |
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10
Dawn O'Hara, the girl who laughed.: Frontispiece in colors by R. Ford Harper.
1911, Grosset & Dunlap
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November 22, 2011 | Edited by WorkBot | merge works |
November 22, 2011 | Edited by WorkBot | add editions to new work |
November 4, 2011 | Edited by WorkBot | merge works |
November 4, 2011 | Edited by WorkBot | add editions to new work |
April 30, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |