A president is born

"A president is born" by Fannie Hurst is a novel written in the early 20th century. It appears as a fictional family chronicle tracing the formative years of a future U.S. president, David Schuyler, within a bustling Midwestern clan whose center of gravity is the indomitable sister, Rebekka, and the House on Sycamore Street in Centralia.

The opening of the novel plunges into a crowded Thanksgiving at the Schuyler home in 1903, where the Old Gentleman shocks the family by announcing that his wife, Mathilda, is pregnant—an event that heralds the birth of David. We then shift to young Davey’s earthy, sensory childhood—his “Indian in the Corn” game among husk tepees, a landscape and homelife rendered so vividly that a later campaign-train vignette briefly foreshadows his national future. Next, Rebekka’s model farm takes focus: she is tireless, efficient, and commanding, contrasted with her charming but languid artist-husband, Winslow. Davey grows up between two homes: Rebekka’s disciplined, productive farm and the Schuyler house, navigating kin dynamics that include his dreamy, fragile nephew Leslie. Rebekka quietly manages family crises—fielding party-line phone calls, overruling a niece’s risky outing, confronting an aging alcoholic farmhand—and ends the section with a hearty supper tableau that showcases the household’s bonds, tensions, and the boy’s sturdy appetite. (This is an automatically generated summary.)