SOURCE: "American Beauty Shoppe," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 133, No. 3460, October 28, 1931, pp. 462-63.

Van Doren was an esteemed American novelist, critic, and autobiographer; her husband was poet Mark Van Doren. In the following largely negative review of American Beauty, she laments Ferber's reliance on melodrama, a "curse," she argues, that detracts from the potential of the novel.

Imagine a finely designed, sturdily built New England house. There are many such in New England. Imagine the bricks neatly turned and strongly laid, the small-paned windows giving off the mauve and pale rose of old glass, the fan-light over the door a thing of delicately patterned beauty, the chimneys numerous and promising many fires within; imagine the oaks placed justly, the slope from the house covered with turf. Think of the oak sills, as firm as the day they were laid two hundred years ago, the whiteoak rafters, the...