SOURCE: "Edna Ferber," in his On Second Thought, University of Minnesota Press, 1946, pp. 154-64.

In the following review, Gray examines A Peculiar Treasure, contending that it is a forthright autobiography and reveals the particulars of Ferber's literary success.

Edna Ferber is an enormously gifted person. She is also a thoughtful analyst of human experience. This aspect of her intelligence she has seldom revealed in her fiction, which habitually takes a firm, possessive hold upon a heroine and leads her resolutely through a series of highly contrived incidents in a standardized siege against the citadel of success. Ironically, it is in Miss Ferber's autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure, that she fully reveals her talent for offering a detached and impersonal comment on the mixture of perils and pleasures in human life. Here she has made a carefully critical examination of the assets she brought to the task of writing fiction...