Ferber is the author of Show Boat, the title of her 1926 blockbuster classic novel. The book was turned into a popular musical that brought her much money she called "oil well." She won the Pulitzer Prize for So Big, a year earlier in 1925.
Edna Ferber Life in a Nutshell
Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan on August 15, 1885, into a Jewish family. She got a job on a local newspaper when she finished secondary school.
Ferber was always a professional writer. Her experience at the Milwaukee Journal perhaps made her look beyond that. During this period she suffered a breakdown, as figured in her first novel, Dawn O'Hara.
Ferber Early Literary Life
Dawn O'Hara, published when she was 26, was based on her experiences as a journalist and was fairly successful.
Ferber's career took off with the publication of the "Emma McChesney" stories that appeared between 1913 and 1915. Like most of her later writing, the stories capture a strong female character with emotional need who has to work for a living to support her family.
Pulitzer Prize for So Big
In 1925, Ferber won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel So Big, about the struggles of a young, widowed farm woman. That same year, she began work on her most famous of all her tales, the idyllic book, Show Boat, a story based on the floating theatres that traveled the Mississippi River during the late 19th century. Her Show Boat was made into a blockbuster musical film in the masterful hands of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II and songwriter Jerome Kern.
The American Pioneering Spirit
Ferber's subsequent novels explore vast tracts of American land, from the Oklahoma of Cimarron to Alaska's bid for statehood in Ice Palace.
Even in Giant, which upset the citizens of Texas with her portrayal of their state, Ferber shared her characters' faith in the pioneering spirit which created her country.
Works of Edna Ferber
Ferber wrote more than 20 novels. Most of them were bestsellers and celebration of the American culture. She concentrated on the lives of ordinary people, although she upset the citizens of Texas with her unfaltering portrait of their state in her 1952 book Giant. The book became a movie blockbuster starring no less than movie Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean and Rock Hudson.
At the age of 82, Ferber died on April 17, 1968.
She is known for her American patriotic style of writing, with her most enduring masterpiece of all-time, the musical Show Boat.
Books by Edna Ferber
- Dawn O'Hara, 1911
- Roast Beef, Medium, 1913
- Emma McChesney and Co., 1915
- Fanny Herself, 1917
- So Big, 1924
- Show Boat, 1926
- Cimarron, 1930
- A Peculiar Treasure, 1939
- Saratoga Trunk, 1941
- Giant, 1952
- Ice Palace, 1958
Sources:
- McGovern, Una, Ed. Biographical Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers / Harrap Publishers, 2002.
- Payne, Tom. The A-Z of Great Writers. London: Carlton, 1997.
- Goring, Rosemary, Ed. Larousse Dictionary of Writers. New York: Larousse, 1994.
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