FERBER, EDNA

FERBER, EDNA (1887–1968), U.S. novelist and playwright. She was born into a middle-class family in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and at the age of 17 became a newspaper reporter in Appleton, Wisconsin. Later she went to the Milwaukee Journal and the Chicago Tribune. Her first novel, Dawn O'Hara, appeared in 1911, but it was a series of short stories collected under the title Emma Mc-Chesney and Co. (1915) that established her as a professional writer. Edna Ferber wrote more than a score of novels, some superficial, some serious, but all smoothly and persuasively written. They deal with the life of ordinary Americans and in many the central character is a woman. Fanny Herself (1917) is the story of a small-town Jewish girl; So Big (1924), the story of a woman's struggle for independence, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924. Show Boat (1926) became a successful musical; Cimarron (1930), Saratoga Trunk (1941), and Giant (1952) were all best-selling novels which were made into motion pictures. Dinner at Eight (1932) and Stage Door (1936), both written in collaboration with George S. *Kaufman, were her best-known plays. Edna Ferber wrote comparatively little about Jews and Judaism, but in her first autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure (1939), she depicted with humor and understanding her life in a small Jewish community, and she identified herself closely with the Jewish plight during the Nazi years. Her second autobiography, A Kind of Magic (1963), includes her impressions of the State of Israel.

bibliography:

S.I. Kunitz and H. Haycraft (eds.), Twentieth Century Authors (1950²), s.v., and supplement I (1955); Brenn and Spencer, in: Bulletin of Bibliography, 22 (1958), 152–6.

[Harold U. Ribalow]