Bambi by Marjorie Benton Cooke

Description

Bambi opens at the breakfast table with a daughter indicting her father, the professor, and the opening quarrel is a declaration of independence: Bambi intends to live the art she practices. Marjorie Benton Cooke wrote her bright 1914 comedy out of the ferment of the American stage and its hangers-on, and her heroine is a working girl of the theatre — a struggling playwright with spirit, ambition, and a stubborn conviction that the city will make her happy if only she makes herself useful to it.

The novel moves between a Greenwich Village studio and a suburbanizing Manhattan as Bambi, and the cheerful scheme of guardians who want her respectably married, negotiates the narrow path between love and vocation. Her romance is conducted with the banter that became the signature of American stage comedy — witty, friendly, and honest enough to survive contact with real feeling.

Cooke wrote from a lifetime of theatre novels, and Bambi reads as if it were adapted for the stage even as it was written for the page: set scenes, crackling dialogue, curtain lines. Its picture of a young woman betting her future on her own talent made it one of the bestselling American novels of its season and, adapted for the screen, a durable piece of popular culture.

Why readers still come back to it

• A heroine with real agency, decades before that became a literary fashion.
• Sparkling dialogue in the best tradition of American stage comedy.
• A portrait of bohemian New York that still glitters.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition presents the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation optimized for phone, tablet, and e-reader.