Buttered Side Down

Description

This short story collection by Edna Ferber offers an insight into the life of working class young people living in different big cities in the US, at the beginning of the 20th century.

Most of the protagonists are young women who left the small towns where they were born and went to cities like New York or Chicago in search of a better life. They work as sales assistants, waitresses or clerks, each of these girls having secret hopes and dreams that sometimes fulfill in unexpected ways, but, most often, they remain simple aspirations.

Homesickness is a central theme of the stories in the volume, the characters dealing with this feeling in different ways. While some of them realize that true happiness is back home, among the people who know them since they were little kids, the protagonists of other stories bring the atmosphere of the native places with them and find the way to success thanks to this.

In the preface of the volume, the author states that, in real life, there is no happy ending, and the way in which most of the stories conclude confirms this idea. However, even if, for a great number of the young women and men who appear in the book, the slice of bread falls with the buttered side down, every small everyday victory is very important.

A young woman disagrees with her friends on the literary productions that were very popular among the girls in the working class, because, she says, “the heroin does not marry”, this meaning that she fails to have an accomplished life. Another one, who comes from a small town in Michigan to New York, where she aspires to become a great writer, impresses, without realizing it, the editor of a famous magazine.

The great talent of the author is given by the way in which she ends every story, leaving the reader decide if it a sad one or if it has a drop of hope, after all.

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