The basis for the classic film starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, Saratoga Trunk is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edna Ferber's enthralling saga of love, greed, and power set in New Orleans and Saratoga during the late nineteenth century. Saratoga Trunk unfolds the story of Clio Dulaine, an ambitious Creole beauty who more than meets her match in Clint Maroon, a handsome Texan with a head for business—and an eye for beautiful young women. Together they do battle with Southern gentry and Eastern society, but in their obsession to acquire all they've ever wanted, they fail to realize they already have all they'll ever need—each other. A novel by one of the twentieth century's most accomplished and admired writers, Saratoga Trunk is a lively tale of ambition and love that celebrates the triumph of outsiders against the powerful and corrupt. “The greatest American woman novelist of her day.” - New York Times “Clint and Cleo Maroon are among the most vital and engaging figures in Edna Ferber’s long and colorful gallery of heroes and heroines.” - New York Times The basis for the classic film starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, Saratoga Trunk is Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edna Ferber’s enthralling saga of love, greed, and power set in New Orleans and Saratoga during the late nineteenth century. Saratoga Trunk unfolds the story of Clio Dulaine, an ambitious Creole beauty who more than meets her match in Clint Maroon, a handsome Texan with a head for business—and an eye for beautiful women. As different as they are, they share a common trait: they’re both looking to settle a score. Together they do battle with Southern gentry and Eastern society but in their obsession to acquire all they’ve ever wanted, they fail to realize they already have all they’ll ever need—each other. A novel by one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished and admired writers, Saratoga Trunk is a lively tale of ambition and love that celebrates the triumph of outsiders against the powerful and corrupt. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Edna Ferber (1885-1968) was a novelist, short-story writer, and playwright whose work served as the inspiration for numerous Broadway plays and Hollywood films, including Show Boat , Cimarron , Giant , Saratoga Trunk , and Ice Palace . She co-wrote the plays The Royal Family , Dinner at Eight , and Stage Door with George S. Kaufman and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel So Big . Saratoga Trunk By Ferber, Edna Perennial Copyright ©2004 Edna Ferber All right reserved. ISBN: 0060956712 Chapter One They were interviewing Clint Maroon. They were always interviewing old Colonel Maroon. Though he shunned publicity, never had held public office and wasn't really a Colonel at all, he possessed that magnetic flamboyant quality which makes readable news. It wasn't his wealth. America had fifty men as rich as he. Certainly it wasn't social position. He and the spectacularly beautiful Clio Maroon never had figured in formal New York society. It could not have been his great age merely which had brought the reporters into his hotel suite at Saratoga on this, his eighty-ninth birthday, for the newspapers had seized upon him with yelps of joy when first he had dawned dramatically upon their horizon at thirty. They had swarmed on him throughout the three-score years that had elapsed since then; when he turned forty; at his dashing half-century mark; at sixty, when there was scarcely a glint of gray in the reddish-brown hair that was exactly the color of a ripe pecan shell; at seventy, eighty, eighty-five. If Clint Maroon bought an old master or a new yacht, sold short or emerged from a chat with the President of the United States, streamlined one of his railroads or donated a million to charity or science, won the Grand National or took up ice-skating (ever so slightly bow-legged, proof of his Texas past) there the reporters were, clamoring for him. "I'm from the Times, Mr. Maroon ... Herald Tribune, Colonel ... News ... American ... Sun ... Post ... World-Telegram ... My paper would like to know if it's true that you . . ." They liked him. He never said, "Hiyah, boys!" with that false jocularity they so quickly detected. He never whipped a brown oily cylinder out of his vest pocket with a patronizing, "Have a good cigar." His manner was courteous without being hearty. Quietly he answered their questions when he was able, always taking his time about it. just as deliberately he had said, on occasion, "Sorry, young man, but I can't answer that question at this time." Curiously soft-voiced and rather drawling for so big and full-blooded a man, he sometimes gave the effect of being actually shy. Easterners for the most part, the New York newspapermen did not realize that in the Far West of the bad old days the man who was slowest in his speech was likely to be quickest on the draw. They had, in fact, forgotten that Texas was Clint Maroon's early background. He