Everything about Edna Ferber totally explained
Edna Ferber (
August 15 1885 -
April 16 1968), was an
American,
author and
playwright.
Life and works
Edna Ferber was born in
Kalamazoo, Michigan 1885, to a
Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper and his
Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born wife, Jacob Charles and Julia (Neumann) Ferber. She would become a leading American author who wrote a number of successful books and plays.
After living in
Chicago 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 theatrical and film productions have been made based on her works, including:
Show Boat,
Giant,
Saratoga Trunk,
Cimarron (which won an
Oscar) and the
1960 remake. Two of these works -
Show Boat and
Saratoga Trunk - were developed into
musicals. When composer
Jerome Kern proposed turning the very serious
Show Boat into a musical, Ferber was shocked, thinking it would be transformed into a typical light entertainment of the 1920s, and it wasn't until Kern explained that he and
Oscar Hammerstein II wanted to create a different type of musical that Ferber granted him the rights.
Saratoga (musical) was written at a much later date, after serious plots had become acceptable in stage musicals.
In 1925, she won the
Pulitzer Prize for her book
So Big, which was made into a silent film starring Colleen Moore that same year. An early talkie movie remake followed, in 1932, starring
Barbara Stanwyck and
George Brent, with
Bette Davis in a supporting role. 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. A
1953 remake of
So Big starred
Jane Wyman in the Stanwyck role, and is the version most often seen today.
Ferber 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. Ferber and another member of the Round Table,
Alexander Woollcott, were long-time enemies, their antipathy lasting until Woollcott's death in 1943, although
Howard Teichmann states in his biography of Woollcott that this was due to a misunderstanding. According to Teichmann, Ferber once described Woollcott as "a New Jersey Nero who has mistaken his pinafore for a toga."
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 didn't hesitate to call her the greatest American woman novelist of her day."
Ferber had no children, never married, and isn't known to have engaged in a romance or sexual relationship with anyone of either gender. In her early novel
Dawn O'Hara, the title character's aunt is said to have remarked, "Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning -- a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling." Ferber did take a maternal interest in the career of her niece
Janet Fox, an actress who performed in the original Broadway casts of Ferber's plays
Dinner at Eight and
Stage Door.
Ferber was portrayed by
Lili Taylor in
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. In
2002 in her hometown of
Appleton, Wisconsin, the U.S. Postal Service issued an 83-cent commemorative stamp as part of the "Distinguished Americans" series. Artist Mark Summers, well known for his scratchboard technique, created this portrait for the stamp referencing a black-and-white photograph of Ferber taken in 1927.
(External Link
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Partial bibliography
Musical productions based on novels by Ferber include:
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
Further Information
Get more info on 'Edna Ferber'.
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