SOURCE: "A Brilliant Pageant," in New York Herald Tribune Books, October 18, 1931, p. 3.

In the following review, Ross favorably assesses American Beauty.

Miss Ferber's title is cryptic. This story is not, as one might expect, of hothouse America, of cities and show girls and night clubs, but of the green upper valleys of Connecticut. There in the seventeenth century passed a gay procession of Cavaliers.

You saw women a-horseback through the wild grandeur of the Connecticut landscape in fine shoes of flowered russet or red Morocco; silks and velvets and brocades fashioning the gowns under their favorite cloaks of scarlet. The men, too, in cloaks of fine red cloth, with long vests of plush in gay colors, and plush breeches.

They went onward, the more adventurous, where Western lands were richer; later the cities drained the land of its most adventurous. Behind them they left Oakes House, set proudly...