Edna Ferber
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Edna Ferber (August 15 1885 - April 16 1968), was an American , author and playwright.
Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan (in 1885, not 1887 as sometimes stated), to a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper and his Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born wife, Jacob Charles and Julia (Neumann) Ferber. She would become a leading female American author who wrote a number of successful books and plays.
After living in Chicago, Illinois and Ottumwa, Iowa, at age 12, Ferber and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she graduated from high school and briefly attended Lawrence University. She took jobs at the Appleton Daily Crescent and the Milwaukee Journal before publishing her first novel. She covered the 1920 Republican and Democratic national conventions for the United Press Association.
Her novels generally featured a strong female as the protagonist, although she fleshed out multiple characters in each book. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons; through this technique, Ferber demonstrated her belief that people are people and that the non-so-pretty persons have the best character.
Due to her imagination in scene, characterization and plot, several movies have been made based on her works, including: Show Boat (a musical featuring Paul Robeson's marvelous rendition of "Old Man River"), Giant (starring Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean), Saratoga Trunk, Cimarron (which won an Oscar) and the 1960 remake.
In 1925, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book So Big, which was made into an early talkie movie in 1932, starring Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent. It was the only movie Stanwyck and Davis ever appeared in together, and Stanwyck played Davis' mother-in-law, although only a year older in real life, which allegedly displeased her, as did the attitude of the hoydenish Davis.
She was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of wits who met for lunch every day at the Algonquin Hotel in New York.
Edna Ferber died on April 16, 1968, at her home in New York City, of cancer, at the age of 82. The New York Times said, "she was among the best-read novelists in the nation, and critics of the 1920s and 1930s did not hesitate to call her the greatest American woman novelist of her day".
Partial bibliography
- 1911 Dawn O'Hara
- 1913 Roast Beef, Medium
- 1914 Personality Plus
- 1915 Emma Mc Chesney and Co.
- 1915 [Our Mrs. McChesney] (with George V. Hobart)
- 1917 Fanny Herself
- 1918 Cheerful - By Request
- 1919 Half Portions
- 1921 The Girls
- 1922 Gigolo
- 1924 So Big
- 1924 [Minick] (with G. S. Kaufman)
- 1926 Show Boat
- 1927 The Royal Family (with G. S. Kaufman)
- * Revived in 1975
- 1929 Cimarron
- 1931 American Beauty
- 1932 Dinner at Eight (with G. S. Kaufman)
- * Revived in 1966, 2002
- 1933 They Brought Their Women
- 1935 Come and Get It
- 1926 Stage Door (with G. S. Kaufman)
- 1938 Nobody's in Town
- 1939 A Peculiar Treasure
- 1941 Saratoga Trunk
- 1941 No Room at the Inn
- 1941 [The Land Is Bright] (with G. S. Kaufman)
- 1945 Great Son
- 1945 Saratoga Trunk (with Casey Robinson)
- 1948 [Bravo!] (play with G. S. Kaufman)
- 1949 Bravo (novel with G. S. Kaufman)
- 1952 Giant
- 1958 Ice Palace
- 1963 A Kind of Magic
- 1927 Show Boat - music by Jerome Kern, lyrics and book by Oscar Hammerstein II, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld
- * Revived in 1932, 1946, 1983 and 1994
- 1959 [Saratoga] - music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, dramatized by Morton Da Costa
External links
- [Edna Ferber] at the Internet Broadway Database
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