[In the following favorable review of Cimarron, the critic explores the character of Yancy Cravat and applauds the portrayal of pioneer life in the Oklahoma territory.]

The exuberance and gusto, the robust romanticism of Miss Ferber's Cimarron are so compelling that they almost insensitize the reader against its artistic deficiencies. For this is a tale in the same vein as Miss Ferber's Showboat, frankly glamourous, headlong in its story-telling fervor. She has filled in with the boldest of strokes a canvas even more colorful, more animated, than her picture of troupers' life in the old days on the Mississippi. The scene of Cimarron is Oklahoma, and the story is traced against one of the most spectacular backgrounds in American life. The opening up of that great territory, its overnight settlement in the Run of '89, the raw days of its mushroom growth, the fantastic scramble when oil was discovered—these are the materials upon which Miss Ferber has drawn. "Only the more fantastic and improbable events contained in this book," she says in her foreword, "are true…. In many cases material entirely true was discarded as unfit for use because it was so melodramatic, so absurd as to be too strange for the realm of fiction."

The story is told chiefly through the experience of Yancey Cravat and the young wife who went with him from their home in Kansas to seek their fortunes in the new territory. This Yancey Cravat is by all odds the best of Miss Ferber's creations, and one of the most picturesque figures in the whole range of American fiction. Gaylord Ravenal of Showboat is pale beside him. Big, hearty and handsome, with a "great buffalo head" which he had a trick of lowering when stirred to anger, with his flowery speech and his immense animal vitality, his romantically shrouded and whispered-about past, he had swept young Sabra Venable off her feet when he came to Wichita from no one knew where and launched his fiery paper, The Wichita Wigwam. The Venables, Mississippi gentry who had migrated to Kansas after the Civil War, could never whole-heartedly accept him. They worried about his antecedents, the gossip that said he was of Indian blood, the reports of his lawless life in the Cimarron, that stretch of No-Man's Land on the border between Texas and the Indian Territory. They had given him their daughter with strong misgivings.

There is no better scene in Miss Ferber's novel than her opening one, in which Yancey, before the assembled Venables, tells them the story, hypnotized against their will, of the great Oklahoma Run from which he had just returned:

"Folks, there's never been anything like it since creation. Creation! Hell! That took six days. This was done in one. It was history made in an hour—and I helped make it. Thousands and thousands of people from all over this vast Commonwealth of ours" (he talked like that) "traveled hundreds of miles to get a bare piece of land for nothing. But what land! Virgin, except when the Indians had roamed it. 'Lands of lost gods and godlike men!' They came like a procession—a crazy procession—all the way to the border, covering the ground as fast as they could, by any means at hand—scrambling over the ground, pushing and shoving each other into the ditches to get there first. God knows why—for they all knew that once arrived there they'd have to wait like penned cattle for the firing of the signal shot that opened the promised land. As I got nearer the line it was like ants swarming on sugar. Over the little hills they came, and out of the scrub-oak woods and across the prairie. They came from Texas and Arkansas and Colorado and Missouri. They came on foot, by God, all the way from Iowa and Nebraska! They came in buggies and wagons and on horseback and muleback. In prairie schooners and ox carts and carriages….

Yancey was on fire with enthusiasm for the new country. He was going back, he said, to have a part in its building up, and Sabra and little Cim would go with him. Sabra was eager, her family dismayed. They went, Sabra picturing herself as one of the pioneer women whom Yancey eulogized as having "made this country what it is." The rawness of the life was to be a shock to her, but Sabra belongs in the line of Miss Ferber's indomitable, executive women whom she endows with strength beyond that of their men, and Sabra is to repeat their history. Yancey becomes a force in the Oklahoma country, but a quixotic force, too restless to run his life in an appointed mold. It is Sabra who takes over the day-by-day management of the paper he founded and builds it up, Sabra who finally embarks on the political career he disdained and thrust away from him. She enters Congress and as we take our leave of her it is hinted that she may become Governor. Yancey's life, for all its glamour, runs a descending scale, his end at once heroic and pathetic. To Sabra belongs the sober triumph. There is a taint of feminist thesis about these women of Miss Ferber's which makes them somewhat synthetic and not wholly convincing.

And indeed, those who like their novels to be unerring in their psychology will find Miss Ferber unsatisfying time and again. She is frequently illogical, free in her use of coincidence, and unsure in her handling of deep emotion, as in the scene of Yancey's death on the last page of Cimarron. But a book like Cimarron is to be read for other reasons. Read it for its vivid re-creation of the scenes through which Yancey and Sabra lived, for its splendidly kaleidoscopic view of a young American city coming into existence, with its shifting social patterns and its broad diversity of types, with its background of disinherited Indians coming at last, by an ironic turn of fate, into that bewildering wealth which oil brought to them. Cimarron is not the sort of book one reads again and again for beauties newly discovered; it is a book which one reads once with avidity, for a picture that remains indelible.