For this iteration, I've decided to read Edna Ferber's Cimarron, which I've never actually read. It's a famous book, though; it had two major movies based on it (the first of which, in 1931, was extraordinarily popular in its day, but has not been treated very well by time, and the second of which you occasionally find shown on TV). The novel's setting is the Oklahoma Land Rush. It was this land run that gave us the word 'sooner', associated with everything Oklahoma -- sooners were originally people who cheated in the race to stake a claim, but the word has since been romanticized, largely because of its association with college football. It's hard to avoid the joke that this tells you half of everything most people will ever need to know about Oklahoma.
Ferber herself was a very popular author in her day, and her books were regularly made into plays and movies. She was for some time a member of the Algonquin Round Table, but had an ongoing feud with Alexander Woollcott, one of the regular members. She was originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan, but lived all sorts of places before her death of stomach cancer in 1968.
