SOURCE: "Tintypes by Ferber," in The New York Times Book Review, January 28, 1945, p. 5.

Du Bois was an American educator, novelist, poet, playwright, and critic. In the following review of Great Son, he argues that Ferber has failed to provide her potentially interesting characters with a suitably compelling plot.

First there's Exact Melendy—a great-grandame complete with Godey-book silks, medicinal rye, toy railroad, and the finest view in all Seattle. Then there's her son Vaughan—a two-fisted taker in his day. There's Emmy, his pneumatic wife, whose mother was a Mercer girl. There's his son Klondike, born of Pansy, his violet-eyed Alaskan mistress, and offered to the world as his legal off-spring. Dike, despite a crumbling fullback facade, is soft at forty-odd. Could he be otherwise, after such American luxury items as "Harvard and good scotch and third-row seats and four-rib roasts and sixteen-cylinder cars?"

There's Lina, his wife...