Novel: Come and Get It

Overview

"Come and Get It" is a 1935 novel by Edna Ferber set against the boom-and-bust world of Wisconsin's lumber industry. Centered on Barney Glasgow, a hard-driving timberman who rises from rough beginnings to become a powerful magnate, the story traces both the making of a fortune and the damage that ambition can leave behind. Ferber combines vivid regional color with a sweeping, unsentimental look at money, class, and the hunger to belong to something bigger.

The novel begins in the forests and logging camps of northern Wisconsin, where the lumber trade is brutally physical, chaotic, and full of opportunity for men willing to endure hardship and risk. Barney is introduced as a shrewd, forceful, deeply restless figure whose instincts for survival and advancement are stronger than his loyalty to any person or place. He emerges from the world of axe-men, camp bosses, and speculators with an eye for profit and a talent for seizing moments others miss. Ferber presents his rise not as a simple success story, but as a bargain with the demands of the age: to climb, Barney must harden himself and keep moving upward, even when that drive separates him from ordinary human connection.

A major thread of the novel is Barney's relationship with the women in his life, especially his attraction to beauty, status, and emotional intensity. Ferber uses these relationships to show the difference between possession and understanding. Barney wants not only wealth but refinement, social legitimacy, and the prestige that comes with being accepted by a higher class. Yet his desires are often tangled with vanity, insecurity, and a deep need to remake himself. The novel explores how ambition can become a form of self-creation, but also a kind of self-betrayal, as Barney repeatedly sacrifices intimacy and peace for the image of success.

Ferber's treatment of class aspiration is one of the novel's most striking features. Barney's ascent brings him into contact with people who represent older wealth, social polish, and cultural authority, and he is acutely aware of the distance between his origins and the world he wants to enter. That tension gives the book much of its emotional force. Barney is never simply an outsider longing to be included; he is also a man who has helped build the very structures that now measure his exclusion. Through him, Ferber examines American ideas about merit, respectability, and the uneasy truth that money can buy power without necessarily conferring belonging.

The title itself reflects the novel's larger vision: the world is a place of aggressive competition, where opportunity must be seized before it disappears. That attitude governs the lumber business, where forests are cut down, fortunes are made, and whole landscapes are transformed. But the phrase also captures the novel's moral pressure. The call to "come and get it" suggests abundance, appetite, and conquest, yet what is gained often comes at a cost. Ferber makes clear that the rewards of industrial America are entwined with waste, exhaustion, and emotional loss.

Though the novel is expansive and dramatic, it remains grounded in Ferber's keen sense of place and character. The Wisconsin setting is not just background but a force in the story, shaping the people who live and work there and reflecting the rough energy of the lumber era. "Come and Get It" ultimately offers a powerful portrait of American ambition: its daring, its ruthlessness, and its lonely aftermath.