[Gale was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American dramatist, novelist, essayist, and critic. In the following favorable review of Come and Get It, she applauds the unrelenting pace of the novel.]

There are two ways, there are many ways of writing fiction from fact. One is to use the method which Henry Adams employed not for writing fiction, but for imposing a mood. For permitting the reader not so much exercises in shared factual observation as in opening a door, offering a threshold. In San Christobal de la Habana Joseph Hergesheimer employs, again not for fiction, the same method—giving the reader no record, no sequence, but catching him up into the very air and levels of that which he has to communicate. Virginia Woolf is able to use these channels to a mood, and indeed to a record, in fiction itself; and some of the younger fiction writers are employing these ways, experimentally, or else simply and with no thought that there is any other way to write.

Such handling of material which is based on some moment of the past, may have all the fabric of tapestry, of anything woven and colored and dim. It may be like needle-point, all leafy and shadowy, with certain sudden detail of faces, etched out in petit point clear, telling, small vignettes of the chief actors in high moments. And over all there will be that somnolence which settles even on the immediate past, even on yesterday, so that yesterday's beings will be wrapped in their certain heritage—dream. All this is so handled, for example, in Lamb in His Bosom, life throbbing but already divined from somewhere else, seen as the moon sees it.

But now here is Edna Ferber, with a story of Wisconsin woods and Wisconsin lumber days, which records the history of Barney Glasgow as if he and his family moved beneath a make-up glass, every pore visible. The drive of her Come and Get It is enormous—title, talk, pages which tell how paper is made, from pulp to print, how a tree is felled from notch to crash; the camp routine, the men, the lumbertown hotel and theater—all are recorded with an unequalled power of factual observation, so that one, knowing nothing of these facts, knows too that their documentation must be minutely accurate. A great glass is laid upon them all. Voices, other sounds, phrases, gestures, resentments, angers, all are thrown large on a near screen. That mythical woodsman, Paul Bunyan, seems to have cast his spell here, and all the people loom large, loud, more. You see Gargantuan figures, definite, moving in a crash of trees, din of dishes, throb of the mill, clash of action and reaction. The book moves like wind and water and thunder, there is not a dull moment—or a still moment—in its progress. Even the inversions add to its rushing flowage: "Down the stairway of his house came Barney Glasgow," to breakfast, and with a grim intention. The characterizations, so apt, so thrusting, are threaded through with the comment of the author, as it were in person, with an immense power of witty and vital detail, pouring from the lips of the recorder. And the reader is borne from phrase to phrase, as before a rapid speaker.

The story of Barney, millionaire papermill owner, retrospectively cookee, chore boy, cruiser, is a rounded whole, done with that which one feels to be fidelity and knows to be extraordinary power. The writing of his history, the drawing of his family and of Swan, the vignette of the tragedy of the trees. Lotta Morgan escaped from the "stockades," the slow dawn of Barney's recrudescence, the pitiful waste of emptiness of the little Napoleon, intent on himself, all this is gorgeously painted, in a great slashing laying-out of facts from the shoulder, definite and driven and somehow filled with sound. Incredible talk, some of it—phrases, and accusations and a roughage, current among the "principals." Clatter, stamping, crackling, exclamation, chiding, altercation, rebellion—all the words of sound are there, very loud.

The first sixteen chapters of the book are an absorbing tale, carrying one breathlessly, remorselessly, to an authentic climax. The story of creatures, caught in the days of the denuding of the land, reaching out for wealth as once they reached for raw meat, and mentally unaware of either process. These people are hewn sharp out of their background and vanish. One is less sure of Lotta, in the pages following. Less sure whether there could be, indeed, a town in which the neighbors, through cruelty or kindness or curiosity, would not once have come to see the wife of their old friend's son; less sure that there is any authentic "society," European or American, which would have received Lotta with no greater change in her than is recorded. But for Barney's story there can be no question. The power and the energy here communicate themselves to the reader, vital, immense. This woman, writing with the drive of her sheer power, observing, recording, communicating to you what she sees—functioning lavishly, like a maple tree, showering down characters, situations, relationships. There they are. Come and get them, as the mill-owners got the trees, as they "got" their lives. There is the picture—take it or leave it. Somehow a wide-hipped, deep-bosomed, loud-voiced picture, of those now gone, yet still beating with blind forces but the mind hardly arisen at all.

And at the end, when Barney's grandchildren stand with Swan, his own teacher, to fell their first tree, and the record goes word for word as it was given for Barney fifty years earlier, felling his first tree, you get that moment of wisdom, of a rhythm beyond their voices, beyond the purring of any dynamo, which lies within the book.

No tapestry of a past, woven and many-colored. But the record of a past, seen in hard sunlight, heard very near at hand, and without a moment dull—or still.