A short life of the author
Edna Ferber (15 August 1885 – 16 April 1968) was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright whose panoramic novels of American life were among the biggest bestsellers and most influential cultural documents of the first half of the twentieth century. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1925 for So Big, wrote Show Boat (1926) — which became the basis for one of the most important musicals in Broadway history — and produced a series of big, ambitious, research-driven novels about American places and industries that were read by millions, adapted into major films, and shaped how Americans understood their own country. She was, for three decades, one of the most famous writers in America, and the fact that she has been largely forgotten by literary culture says more about literary culture’s biases than about the quality of her work.
Life and Career
Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a Hungarian-Jewish father and a Milwaukee-born mother. The family moved frequently during her childhood — to Chicago, Ottumwa, Iowa, and Appleton, Wisconsin — and this peripatetic upbringing gave Ferber the outsider’s eye for American places that characterised her fiction. Her father went blind when she was a teenager, and her mother ran the family store; Ferber’s portrait of strong, resourceful women managing in difficult circumstances began in her own life.
She began her career as a newspaper reporter in Appleton and Milwaukee — one of the few women reporters in Wisconsin — before turning to fiction. Her early short stories, featuring a travelling saleswoman named Emma McChesney, were popular and led to her first novels. The Girls (1921) and So Big (1924) established her as a serious novelist; So Big, about a farmer’s widow raising her son in the truck-farming country south of Chicago, won the Pulitzer Prize.
The Major Novels
Ferber’s great novels are not character studies or experimental narratives — they are portraits of American places, industries, and communities, researched with the thoroughness of a journalist and written with the scope of an epic novelist. Each novel takes a piece of America and dramatises its history through the lives of vivid characters.
Show Boat (1926) — set on a Mississippi riverboat theatre — became the basis for Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s musical Show Boat (1927), which revolutionised American musical theatre by integrating serious dramatic content — including the then-taboo subject of racial intermarriage — into the musical form. The novel itself is a sweeping account of American entertainment, race, and social change from the 1880s to the 1920s.
Cimarron (1929) follows a pioneer family through the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 and the subsequent transformation of the territory into a state. The novel was an enormous bestseller and was adapted into a film (1931) that won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Ferber’s portrait of frontier chaos and boosterism remains vivid.
Giant (1952) is a portrait of Texas — its cattle ranches, its oil wealth, its racial prejudices, and its outsized self-regard. The novel was a bestseller and was adapted into a film (1956) starring James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson. Ferber spent months researching in Texas, and her outsider’s perspective on Texan culture — admiring its energy, critical of its racism and misogyny — produced one of the most vivid portraits of the state ever written.
Ice Palace (1958) is about Alaska on the eve of statehood — a novel about the last American frontier. Saratoga Trunk (1941) is set in New Orleans and Saratoga Springs in the Gilded Age.
Playwright
Ferber was also a successful playwright, collaborating with George S. Kaufman on several Broadway hits: The Royal Family (1927), a comedy about a theatrical dynasty based on the Barrymores; Dinner at Eight (1932); and Stage Door (1936). The Ferber-Kaufman collaborations were among the smartest and most commercially successful plays of the interwar Broadway stage.
Why She’s Been Forgotten
Ferber’s critical neglect is a case study in literary politics. Her novels are big, popular, expertly crafted, and deeply engaged with American social reality — but they are not modernist in form, and they were enormously commercially successful, which in the mid-twentieth-century literary establishment was taken as evidence of shallowness. She was also a woman writing about subjects — family, community, race, the domestic economy of American life — that male critics tended to dismiss. The result is that a writer who was a household name for thirty years has largely disappeared from literary history.
Collecting Ferber
So Big (1924, Doubleday, Page) in first edition with dust jacket brings $200–$500. Show Boat (1926, Doubleday, Page) brings $150–$400. Cimarron (1929, Doubleday, Doran) brings $100–$300. Giant (1952, Doubleday) brings $50–$150. Ferber’s earlier novels and story collections are modestly priced. Signed copies are uncommon — Ferber was a private person — and command premiums of 50–100% over unsigned copies.