It marked an epoch in Chet's life-that letter. It reached out across the Atlantic Ocean from the Chester Ball of his Chicago days, before he had - Edna Ferber

She seemed to put an enormous amount of energy into those cleanings-as if they were a sort of safety valve.

All my writing life I have written to please first myself. Never, except wartime, have I written to order on a theme or subject definitely requested or suggested. But war, to me, is not life at all. It is an excrescence, a cancer on the body of civilization.

The sharp-tongued Kitty O’Hara used to say that being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.