SOURCE: "Everyday Folk," in The New York Times Book Review, April 20, 1913, p. 232.

In the following favorable review of Roast Beef, Medium, Hawthorne praises Ferber's depiction of the modern American woman.

"Roast beef, medium." A sane sensible order, pretty certain to result in something wholesome and satisfying. Not a food only, as Miss Ferber tells us, but a philosophy. Not a philosophy only, but an art, an art she makes delightful in this volume of stories [Roast Beef, Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock], telling not about the exceptional, the lurid, or the miraculous, but just about the everyday, regular, I've-met them-a-dozen-times sort of people.

First of all, the book is human, ever so human and ever so real. The heroine, Emma McChesney, is a living creature, some one we get to know well and can't afterward do without. Even if we've only met...