So Big

So Big is a novel by the American writer Edna Ferber, published in 1924. It was a bestseller in the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.

Selina Peake Dejong is raised by a father who finds beauty in ordinary things. She marries into a Dutch farming community in South Holland, Illinois, and is widowed early, which leaves her to support herself and her son by working the land. She makes a success of truck farming, which means doing accounts, arguing about prices and learning how markets treat people who grow vegetables for a living. Her son, Dirk, is sent out into the city with the advantages her work has paid for, and the novel follows what he becomes. Ferber draws a picture of Chicago and its surrounding country in a period of rapid change, and uses the family to examine poverty, the pressure to become American, the arguments between generations and the limited options available to a woman who wants to work.

The book was inspired by the life of a real Dutch immigrant, and it is one of the novels that established Ferber's reputation for writing about ordinary working lives.