Edna Ferber

Ferber, Edna (1887–1968), playwright. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the celebrated novelist wrote for the stage, although most of her better plays were collaborations. In 1915, working with George V. Hobart, she gave Ethel Barrymore one of the actress's favorite roles as Our Mrs. Chesney. Following an unsuccessful solo effort, The Eldest, and a collaboration with Newman Levy, $1200 a Year (both in 1920), Ferber joined with George S. Kaufman to write the plays for which she is best remembered: Minick (1924), The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door (1936). Less well received were two other collaborations with Kaufman: The Land Is Bright (1941) and Bravo! (1948). Two of her novels were made into musicals, Show Boat (1927) and Saratoga (1959), the latter from Saratoga Trunk. Biography: Ferber, Julie Goldsmith Gilbert, 1978.

• Born: Aug 15, 1887 in Kalamazoo, Michigan
• Died: Apr 16, 1968 in New York, New York
• Occupation: Writer
• Active: '20s-'30s, '50s
• Major Genres: Drama, Romance
• Career Highlights: Giant, Stage Door, Dinner at Eight
• First Major Screen Credit: So Big (1924)

Biography

Edna Ferber was probably the most respected and widely read woman author of the 20th century, and ranks among the most influential female novelists in history. Her books, which often told large, sweeping stories across a great historical arc from the standpoint of ordinary men and women, sold in the millions, while the plays adapted from them enjoyed long runs and the films adapted from them were among the most successful of their respective eras. Ferber was born to a Jewish family in Kalamazoo, MI, in 1885, the daughter of Jacob Charles Ferber and the former Julia Neumann. She intended to study at Northwestern University, but was forced instead to take a job as a reporter on the Appleton Daily Crescent in Wisconsin, and later went to work for the Milwaukee Journal. It was this early career in journalism that allowed Ferber to perfect her observer's eye for the small details of people's lives and the psychology that motivated them, which she put into the service of her fiction later on, as well as bringing her into close contact with the working men and women who populated her books.

It was anemia, developed out of her exhaustion from overwork as a reporter, that brought Ferber to the writing of fiction. She decided to try it while convalescing and ended up with a short story entitled Dawn O'Hara, which she sold to a magazine almost immediately. That marked the end of her career as a reporter -- from that day forward, she wrote short stories, novels, and plays. Ferber first achieved fame with a series of stories about Emma McChesney, a traveling saleswoman selling underskirts, which eventually ran to more than 30 installments because of its popularity. It was those stories for which, to her embarrassment, President Theodore Roosevelt remembered her when the two met in 1904 at the Republican National Convention. Her works also tended to yield other, even more significant works, on occasion -- it was while in New London, CT, at a tryout of the play Minnick that the producer Winthrop Ames wryly suggested hiring a show boat, which led her to ask what a show boat was, which led her to the then still extant world of show boats working the southern and border states, and resulted in the novel Show Boat (1926). Similarly, it was during a visit with William Allen White that she heard of the Oklahoma and Indian territories, and the opening of the West, which led her to write Cimarron. Show Boat, of course, became the groundbreaking (indeed, one might say, defining) musicals by Jerome Kern, which was later successfully filmed twice, once in 1936 and again in 1951, with an abridged (sort of "Cliff Notes") version slotted into the 1946 Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By, as well. Cimarron was also filmed twice during her lifetime, and a few of her stories, such as So Big -- which dealt with life on a truck farm near Chicago -- were filmed three times, counting early silent versions.

Additionally, Ferber enjoyed much success as a theater writer, principally in collaboration with George S. Kaufman, and plays such as Stage Door and Dinner at Eight, which became major motion pictures as well (Dinner at Eight was also revived on-stage in New York in 2003). What's more, her popularity never waned -- Ferber's book Giant, telling of the state of Texas and how it changed across the 20th century, was published in 1952, a half century into her career, and sold three million copies, as well as generating the George Stevens movie Giant (1956), which is perhaps the best known film to be derived directly from one of Ferber's books. Ironically, when it first appeared, the political powers in Texas resented the book, believing that it showed too many negatives about the state, but the movie was so popular there, and its Dimitri Tiomkin score was so appealing, that the title music was adopted by the legislature as the state song. Ice Palace came from this same late period, published in 1958 and dealing with Alaska, and it was filmed in 1960 in an epic production, running 143 minutes and starring Richard Burton and Robert Ryan. Regarded as the greatest American woman novelist of the 1920s and 1930s, Ferber almost outlived her fame -- by the time of her death in 1968, she was a literary institution. Though there have been no fresh adaptations of her work in the decades since -- and the owners of the most recent film version of So Big even declined to renew the underlying literary rights to that property -- works such as Dinner at Eight, Show Boat, and Giant continue to exert a very strong pull on audiences more than a century after Ferber's birth. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Ice Palace Buy this Movie	Cimarron Buy this Movie	Giant Buy this Movie	Show Boat Buy this Movie
Saratoga Trunk Buy this Movie	Stage Door Buy this Movie	Come and Get It Buy this Movie	Show Boat Buy this Movie

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American author Edna Ferber (1887-1968) wrote popular fiction and collaborated on several successful Broadway plays.

Born in Kalamazoo, Mich., Edna Ferber at an early age moved with her family to Appleton, Wis., where she spent most of her childhood. When her father lost his vision, she was forced to forsake her acting ambitions and, at the age of 17, began full-time work as a reporter for the Appleton Daily Crescent. Shortly afterward she joined the staff of the Milwaukee Journal and later the Chicago Tribune. During this period she wrote several short stories, some of which were published in Everybody's Magazine. She discarded a novel which her mother salvaged and had published in 1911 as Dawn O'Hara. Two short-story collections followed, Buttered Side Down (1912) and Roast Beef Medium (1913), and the novels Fanny Herself (1917), The Girls (1921), and Gigolo (1922).

Ferber won her first popular success with the novel So Big, the story of a young widow on a truck farm in Illinois who sacrifices everything for her son's happiness. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1924. Show Boat (1926), perhaps her best novel, tells the story of a showboat performer's love for an unscrupulous gambler. The novel was adapted as a successful Broadway musical the following year. Cimarron, another best seller, dealt with the spectacular Oklahoma land rush of 1889. In the early 1920s Ferber began a fruitful collaboration with playwright George S. Kaufman, producing such plays as Minick (1924), The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door (1936).

In her later novels Ferber continued to explore various geographical and historical settings. American Beauty (1931) describes Polish immigrants in Connecticut; Come and Get It (1935) is about Wisconsin lumbermen; and Great Son (1945) depicts four generations of a Seattle family.

Many of Ferber's novels have been made into movies, including Saratoga Trunk (1941), which is set in New Orleans and Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and deals with the founding of railroad dynasties; Giant (1950), a story of oil fortunes in contemporary Texas; and Ice Palace (1958), about Alaska, from exploration to the fight for statehood.

Ferber published her first autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure, in 1939 and her second, A Kind of Magic, in 1963. Her often energetic and pleasantly nostalgic work was immensely popular with both the reading public and movie-and playgoers, making her one of America's best-known authors. She died on April 16, 1968, in New York City.

Further Reading

Miss Ferber's fiction is reviewed in Robert Van Gelder, Writers and Writing (1946), and W. Tasker Witham, Panorama of American Literature (1947).

Additional Sources

Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith., Ferber, a biography, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978.

For more information on Edna Ferber, visit Britannica.com.

Ferber, Edna, 1887–1968, American author, b. Kalamazoo, Mich. Her novels portray the lives of a wide variety of Americans in a vigorous, colorful, and panoramic fashion. Among her best-known novels are So Big (1924, Pulitzer Prize), Show Boat (1926, musical version 1927), Cimarron (1929), Saratoga Trunk (1941), Giant (1952), and Ice Palace (1958). Ferber also collaborated with George S. Kaufman on such plays as The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door (1936).

(1887-1968)

1913	Roast Beef, Medium. After publishing a minor novel, Dawn O'Hara (1911), and a short story collection, Buttered Side Down (1912), Ferber achieves her first success by introducing a new fictional type--the career woman--in the character Emma McChesney. The stories in this collection had begun to appear in 1911. Additional adventures of the divorced mother are collected in Personality Plus (1914) and Emma McChesney and Co. (1915).
1924	Minick. After an unsuccessful solo dramatic effort, The Eldest (1920), and an equally unsuccessful collaboration with Newman Levy in $1200 a Year (1920), Ferber joins forces with Kaufman for the first in a series of hits. Based on one of Ferber's stories, the play concerns an elderly man who must choose between living with his son and daughter-in-law or in an old-folks home.
1924	So Big. Ferber's popular novel about a mother's sacrifices for her son wins the Pulitzer Prize and contributes to her reputation as the major woman novelist of her day.
1926	Show Boat. Ferber's novel centers on Magnolia Hawkes, the daughter of a Mississippi River showboat captain. She marries an irresponsible gambler who takes her away from her life on the river and then deserts her. The story continues with the career of their daughter. The novel features an exploration of miscegenation that was daring for its time and would inspire the popular 1927 musical by Hammerstein and Kern.
1930	Cimarron. Ferber's popular novel capturing life in Oklahoma during the 1899 land rush, the discovery of oil, and more modern history continues the author's documentation of American history and its regions.
1941	Saratoga Trunk. Ferber's historical novel is set during the 1880s in Saratoga Springs, New York, and New Orleans.
1952	Giant. Ferber's last major work tells the story of Texas rancher Bick Benedict and the Virginia girl he marries and introduces to Texas life. The novel stirs regional resentment at the perceived unflattering portrait of Texas. A 1956 film version, featuring the last screen appearance by James Dean, would help popularize the novel.

Quotes:

"Roast Beef, medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy. Seated at Life's Dining Table, with the menu of Morals before you, your eye wanders a bit over the entr?es, the hors d'oeuvres, and the things ? la though you know that Roast Beef, medium, is safe and sane, and sure."

"America -- rather, the United States -- seems to me to be the Jew among the nations. It is resourceful, adaptable, maligned, envied, feared, imposed upon. It is warm-hearted, over-friendly; quick-witted, lavish, colorful; given to extravagant speech and gestures; its people are travelers and wanderers by nature, moving, shifting, restless; swarming in Fords, in ocean liners; craving entertainment; volatile. The chuckle among the nations of the world."

"Wasn't marriage, like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too well ordered and protected and guarded? Wasn't it finer, more splendid, more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt?"

"A woman can look both moral and exciting -- if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle."

"I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours."

"Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death."

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