Cimarron, Edna Ferber
Cimarron, Edna Ferber
List: $19.49 | Sale: $13.64
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Cimarron

Author: Edna Ferber

Narrator: Adno Ferber

Unabridged: 10 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: The Essentials

Published: 02/07/2026


Synopsis

Cimarron is Edna Ferber's sweeping novel of the American frontier and the making of modern society. Set during the Oklahoma land rush and its aftermath, the novel follows the Cravat family as they navigate ambition, displacement, and moral compromise in a rapidly changing territory where law, ownership, and identity are still being defined.

At the center of the novel is the tension between idealism and reality. Public progress—new towns, newspapers, courts, and businesses—emerges alongside private failures, broken relationships, and unacknowledged injustice. Ferber presents the frontier not as myth, but as a social experiment shaped by power, exclusion, and endurance.

Broad in scope yet attentive to personal cost, Cimarron examines how nations are formed through both vision and violence. Clear-eyed and unsentimental, the novel remains a foundational work of American historical fiction, capturing the construction of order out of expansion and uncertainty.

About Edna Ferber

Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Edna Ferber (1885-1968) was a novelist, short-story writer, and playwright whose work served as the inspiration for numerous Broadway plays and Hollywood films, including Show Boat, Cimarron, Giant, Saratoga Trunk, and Ice Palace. She co-wrote the plays The Royal Family, Dinner at Eight, and Stage Door with George S. Kaufman and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel So Big.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeff on February 02, 2017

The most popular book of 1930! So my second crazy reading goal of 2017 is to read the “most popular” book of the year for each year that ends in zero, beginning in 1930. I’m intentionally choosing “popular” books over either “classic” or “critically acclaimed” because I’m hoping to catch a little bit......more

Goodreads review by Martin on October 30, 2012

There are two excellent film versions (in my opinion, some people don't like either version) of this novel, one in 1930 starring Irene Dunne and another in 1960 starring Maria Schell. They adapt the novel in very different ways, highlighting certain characters over others and changing events at will......more

Goodreads review by K.M. on February 20, 2012

Cimarron marks the end (for now) of my excursion into Edna Ferber's works, and it embodies many of the strengths and flaws Ferber portrays in all her stories. On the plus side, we have strong, almost painfully realistic characters. There is a demanding undercurrent of no-nonsense tell-it-like-it-is b......more

Goodreads review by Lee Anne on December 06, 2016

Another strong Ferber novel. This one reads like a practice run for Giant: genteel woman goes into the Wild West, finds she's stronger than she knew. Giant is the far better novel, though, with this one having a rushed ending and feeling like a compressed epic. There are also several troubling-for-t......more

Goodreads review by Nicholas on November 04, 2017

[URL not allowed] Cimarron is a really good book, a feminist text (the words "feminist" and "feminism" are actually used) whose guts were torn out of it by Hollywood. The central character of the novel is Sabra Cravat, daughter of a Southern family who moved to Kansas after......more