LEST WE FORGET  EDNA FERBER
(August 15, 1885 - April 16, 1968)

She described herself as a 'blighted Bernhardt'.

Edna Ferber's childhood was nomadic. Her family moved from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Chicago, to Ottumwa, Iowa, back to Chicago, to Appleton, Wisconsin and again to Chicago.  Chicago later served as home base for Ferber, but Ottumwa and Appleton had the greatest impact on the young Edna. She never forgot the anti-Semitic treatment she underwent in the Iowa coal-mining town, though as an adult she saw her seven years there as "stringent, strengthening years" that gave her "a solid foundation of stamina, determination and a profound love of justice". Although she did not practice the Jewish religion, she was proud of her Jewish heritage and lashed out against anti-Semitism throughout her career.

From the age of seven to seventeen she read at least one book a day by such authors as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, O. Henry, George Eliot, and Guy de Maupassant.  The theatre was an important part of her life, as she noted in her autobiography A Peculiar Treasure. "Certainly I have been stage-struck all my life.  The theatre served as a refuge during the family's Iowa years.  "I suppose it was the color, an escape in that dour, unlovely world."   Her love affair with the theatre continued at the high school in Appleton, WI, where she played leading roles in school plays.   She wanted to attend the Northwestern University School of Elocution in Evanston, Illinois. Her father's income could not support a college education. She  didn't want to be a writer; she loved the stage.

Foremost among her twelve novels were So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926), Cimarron (1930),
Saratoga Trunk (1941), Giant (1952), and Ice Palace (1958).  Eight of her novels were made into films.

Her career as a playwright began in 1914. Upon returning from her first trip to Europe, she agreed to  collaborate with George V. Hobart on a play based on Emma McChesney, a character she had created and published stories about her in magazines.  Entitled Our Mrs. McChesney, it opened at the
Lyceum Theatre in 1915. While she was pleased that the play was produced by the Charles Frohman
organization, she was unhappy with the choice of Ethel Barrymore for the title role. She was also disappointed with the script itself, describing it as "clumsy, inept and spiritless."

Playwright George S. Kaufman entered her life as a collaborator and a friend in 1924 when he asked her in a letter if she would like to collaborate with him on writing a play based on her short story, Old Man Minick. Although she was skeptical that the story was stageworthy, she jumped at the chance to work with Kaufman.  "If George had approached me with the idea of dramatizing McGuffey's First Reader, I'd have been enchanted to talk about it." It was the beginning of a work relationship which would produce six plays over the next 24 years.  Minick (1924), The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932), Stage Door (1936), The Land is Bright (1941), and Bravo! (1948).

Critics and biographers credit her with plot and character development in her collaborations with Kaufman and give Kaufman credit for dialogue and playwriting expertise.  George Oppenheimer, in reviewing the 1966 revival of Dinner at Eight, probably best evaluates the contribution of the Ferber and Kaufman team to the American theatre.
"George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber wrote an entertainment rather than an earth-shattering contribution to the art of drama, but it is intricately and wonderfully constructed, filled with bright dialogue and its characters are varied and as absorbing today as well as yesterday."

According to Julie Gilbert, Edna's grand niece, in the preface of her brilliant biography
FERBER  Edna Ferber and Her Circle:  Applause Books 1998.
       "I am fierce about my belief and defense of her prodigious gifts of observation, compassion, accuracy and storytelling.  As a novelist, she was unique--a thermometer of America, she took its pulse with every fiction. As a playwright, she held her own with one of theatre's savviest. She and George S. Kaufman were disciplined collaborators who knew that good work was meat and success was Creme Brulee.
          In her heyday---which lasted from 1924 when she won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel So Big until 1958 with the publication of Ice Palace---Ferber's bread always seemed so plentifully buttered. This was because she knew how to bake and how to churn. She was a hard and honest worker. She had no doubt that with 12 novels, 2 autobiographies, 8 plays, 4 collections of short stories, and a series about a traveling saleswoman which caused Theodore Roosevelt to call her the "dandiest writer in America," she had earned a place in perpetuity."