So Big

Selina Peake, the daughter of a gambler, becomes a schoolteacher in a Dutch farming community near Chicago, marries a stolid farmer and, after his death, works the poor land herself, growing vegetables and selling them at the Chicago market, to give her son Dirk, whom she calls 'So Big', a better life. Dirk grows up to be a rich, successful bond salesman, but his mother wonders whether he has lost the beauty and meaning she found in her own hard life.

Edna Ferber (1885–1968) published the novel in 1924, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925; it entered the public domain in the United States in 2020. Read her Show Boat, and compare Cather's O Pioneers!.