SOURCE: A review of Cheerful—By Request, in The New York Times Book Review, September 22, 1918, pp. 399, 408.

In the following favorable review of Cheerful—By Request, the critic discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the individual stories.

Edna Ferber's new book of short stories [Cheerful—By Request] is thoroughly and entirely—Edna Ferber. Which means that the tales are outwardly simple, inwardly complex stories of human nature, and especially feminine human nature. They differ in detail a good deal, these women, yet fundamentally they are all of one type—the small-town, essentially domestic type of woman, to whom mending and dishwashing and cooking and cleaning are customary and not at all distasteful tasks. And so they are in truth all akin—the lingerie buyer for the big Chicago firm, the woman who came from the sinister "House-with-the-Closed-Shutters," the hotel housekeeper, and the actress and the shopgirl—akin to one...