The Little Lady of the Big House
London Jack, William Van Dresser
Hardcover
(Grosset & Dunlap, July 6, 1916)
The story takes place in the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento. The cover design - depicting a Spanish-style hacienda - is said to be modelled after Mrs. Phoebe Hearst's Hacienda del Pozo de Verona at Pleasanton, California..From dust jacket: "No horse, no driver, no plowman, nothing but the farmer to crank the tractor and start it on its way," Dick exulted, as the uncanny mechanism turned up the brown soil and continued unguided, ever spiraling toward the field's center. "Plow, harrow, roll, seed, fertilize, cultivate, harvest--all from the front porch. And where the farmer can buy juice from a power company, all he, or his wife, will have to do is press the button, and he to his newspaper, and she to her pie-crust."...John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.