A family, a farm, and more than two centuries of a changing America. Generations of the Oakes family have lived on the same Connecticut land, clinging to heritage, property, and social standing even as the world around them changes. In American Beauty, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edna Ferber follows the fortunes of a New England family whose history has become inseparable from the soil they inherited.
As the old order begins to weaken, Polish immigrants arrive to work the surrounding tobacco farms, bringing with them determination, ambition, and dreams of a different future. The lives of the established families and the newcomers become increasingly intertwined through work, desire, resentment, and love, exposing the uneasy boundaries of class, ethnicity, privilege, and belonging.
Spanning generations, American Beauty transforms one Connecticut estate into a portrait of a nation continually remaking itself. With the sweeping storytelling that made So Big, Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant celebrated works of American fiction, Ferber explores what happens when inherited power confronts people determined to create their own place in America.