One of the best-known writers of her day, Edna Ferber was born on August 15, 1885. Edna’s father was a Hungarian-born storekeeper and her mother a native Milwaukeean, and the family eventually settled in Appleton, Wisconsin. Though she longed for a career as an actress, the need for a steady paycheck made Edna opt for journalism instead. She quickly found reporting jobs for the Appleton Daily Crescent and the Milwaukee Journal, and in 1904 covered the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Her skills as a newspaperwoman would heighten Edna’s keen ability to research the variety of subjects she later chose for her novels. Instead of following the old adage write what you know, Edna appeared more interested in learning through writing and was always up for a new adventure.
In her early days as a journalist, however, Edna pushed herself so hard that she became anemic and was forced to convalesce at her family’s home. Never one to lie around and do nothing, Edna decided to write about a fictional Milwaukee reporter named Dawn O’Hara during this recuperative time. Published in 1911, Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed marked the beginning of Edna Ferber’s official literary career.
A prolific and commercially successful author, Edna Ferber won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel So Big in 1925. So Big is about a young widow running a Midwestern farm and raising a child on her own, and like most of Ferber’s work, involves a strong female protagonist rising to life’s many challenges.
Edna was part of the famous Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, critics, and generally brilliant minds of the era who met for lunch in the New York hotel of the same name. Through the 1920s, Round Table attendees exchanged wry commentary and quips over cocktails, and sometimes collaborations formed, such as Edna Ferber and playwright George S. Kaufman. Together, Ferber and Kaufman wrote the plays Dinner at Eight and Stage Door, Stage Door later providing a young Katharine Hepburn with her famous line about the calla lilies being in bloom in the 1937 film adaptation.
While getting ready to stage another play she had written, a chance comment by producer Winthrop Ames sparked Edna’s interest in the setting for the novel she would call Show Boat. Ames spoke of the great riverboats and their musical shows, and how excited people would be to see their arrival along with all the colorful characters on board. Ferber began her research in Bath, North Carolina, former lair of the famous pirate Blackbeard. The showboat The James Adams Floating Palace Theatre eased down the Pamlico River and Edna joined the cast and crew to immerse herself in their magical world. Soon after she penned her well-known tale of Magnolia, Julie, and The Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre, which in turn inspired the often-revived musical and the 1929 and 1951 films.
Among many other versions of Ferber’s work adapted for the screen are So Big, the Academy Award winning Cimarron, and the Academy Award winning Texas epic Giant, which starred Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. Edna Ferber herself was portrayed by actress Lili Taylor in the 1994 Dorothy Parker bio-pic Mrs. Parker and The Vicious Circle, and true to form Edna’s character insists during one Algonquin Round Table session that she can’t sit around and talk all day because she has writing to get to.
In her later years, Edna Ferber published another film-adapted novel, Ice Palace, about the settling of Alaska. As a Jewish girl growing up around the turn of the century, Edna had witnessed discrimination against herself and her parents, and this awareness consistently emerged in her work, particularly the miscegenation issues in Show Boat and Giant, and the prejudice against Inuits in the above-noted Ice Palace. Ferber also published a second autobiography before succumbing to cancer in 1968. Although upon her death Ferber was described primarily as a popular novelist and not a great literary talent, the scope of her subject matter, her unique portrayal of the resilient nature of women, and her focus on ethnic and racial discrimination have earned Edna Ferber much space on library shelves and a long-standing place in American fiction.
Biography of Edna Ferber -- Appleton, Wisconsin Public Library
Historic Bath, North Carolina: Edna Ferber and The Origins of the Novel Show Boat
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