by Edna Ferber
About the Author
“I didn’t want to be a writer,” Edna Ferber admitted in her 1939 autobiography A Peculiar Treasure. “I never had wanted to be a writer. I couldn’t even use a typewriter, never having tried. The stage was my one love. ... I go to the theater because I love it; I write plays for the theater because I love it. I am still wrapped in my childish dream [of being an actress, but]. ... At seventeen my writing career accidentally began.”
That accidental career, of course, was an astounding success. Beginning as a “Girl Reporter” for the Appleton, Wisconsin, Crescent at age seventeen, Ferber parlayed a short stint as a journalist into a long career as a writer of short stories, novels and plays—a career that lasted more than sixty years and brought her great fame and wealth.
Ferber was born on August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Jacob and Julia Ferber, a Hungarian-born Jewish merchant and his American-born wife. Throughout Edna’s childhood, the family moved several times throughout the Midwest before settling in Appleton, where the Ferbers ran a general store. When Jacob began losing his sight to a degenerative eye disease, Julia took control of the family fortunes, running the store with indefatigable shrewdness. A formidable woman, Julia would later appear, fictionalized, in many of her daughter’s novels.
For financial reasons, Ferber set aside her plans to study for a career on the stage and took a job right after high school on the Crescent. After a year and a half covering every imaginable type of story, she was fired by a new editor who disdained her “feminine” writing style, but she was hired immediately by the Milwaukee Journal. Young and enthusiastic, she took her job seriously, neglecting her personal well-being. When she collapsed from exhaustion, she returned to Appleton for what was supposed to be a temporary leave. Except for some freelance assignments during political conventions, however, Ferber never returned to newspaper work. While she was recuperating she wrote her first short story, “The Homely Heroine.” It was published in Everybody’s Magazine and Edna Ferber’s career as a writer of fiction took off.
More stories followed, and a novel, Dawn O’Hara, was published in 1911. In a short story called “Representing T.A. Buck,” Ferber introduced the unusual character of Mrs. Emma McChesney, a divorced traveling saleswoman with a young son, who worked for the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. American Magazine published the story and asked for a second installment. Without having planned it, Ferber embarked on a string of Emma McChesney stories that appeared in American Magazine and Cosmopolitan, were collected into three volumes, and had a huge following (Theodore Roosevelt was a fan). When a reviewer of the third volume, Emma McChesney & Co. (1915) accused Ferber of beating a dead horse, Ferber realized “I had been sliding to oblivion on a path greased by Emma McChesney.” She immediately stopped writing the stories, despite an offer from Cosmopolitan to name her own price. Nonetheless, Ferber did dramatize the stories for the stage, working in collaboration with George V. Hobart. The play, Our Mrs. McChesney, was produced in 1915 and starred Ethel Barrymore.
Ferber’s second novel, Fanny Herself, was published in 1917, her third, The Girls, in 1921. It was Ferber’s next novel, So Big (1924), that established her as a major writer. It won the Pulitzer Prize and became the first of many best sellers she would produce.
While she worked on novels, Ferber continued to publish short stories in magazines and books. One story, “Old Man Minick,” caught the attention of playwright George S. Kaufman, who asked her to collaborate with him on adapting it for the stage. The play, Minick, was the first in an impressive list of collaborations between the two writers. After Minick, Ferber topped the success of So Big with the novel Show Boat (1926), which served as the basis for the now classic 1927 Broadway musical and three film versions. In what surely must be considered a coup for any writer, Show Boat opened on Broadway December 27, 1927, and another Ferber hit, The Royal Family, written with Kaufman, opened the next day.
By this time, Ferber was living full time in New York and hanging around with the legendary wits of the Agonquin Round Table, including Kaufman, Aexander Woollcott, Marc Connelly, Robert Sherwood, Heywood Broun, and Dorothy Parker. But her rigorous work schedule precluded social lunches, and she admitted that she managed to grace these legendary gatherings only three or four times a year.
After Show Boat, many of Ferber’s novels were large-scale social histories that dealt with regional America. Cimarron (1930) recreates the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, American Beauty (1931) is based on a wave of immigration of industrious Polish farmers to New England in the late Nineteenth Century, Come and Get It (1935) deals with the rape of Wisconsin and Michigan forests by the Robber Barons. Other novels include Saratoga Trunk (1941) and Great Son (1945); her other plays with Kaufman include Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door (1936).
Ferber’s 1952 novel Giant, a sprawling contemporary satire of the newly wealthy in Texas, caused quite an uproar in the Lone Star State, but was a huge commercial success. The 1956 film version of the book, famous for being the last film of screen legend James Dean, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning the Oscar for its director, George Stevens. Ice Palace (1958), her last novel, was set in Alaska. She published two volumes of her memoirs, A Peculiar Treasure (1939) and A Kind of Magic ( 1963). Ferber, who never married, died of cancer on April 16, 1968.
Hugely successful in her day, Ferber’s novels have fallen out of favor, perhaps because commercial success often breeds contempt among the intelligentsia. Ferber was a quintessentially American writer, choosing American settings—often huge panoramas—and themes for her work. “Each one of them had been written with a definite underlying theme in mind, and this had, for some baffling reason, been almost entirely overlooked by the average reader,” Ferber once complained. “I found myself regarded as a go-getting best seller and a deft writer of romantic and colorful American novels.”
In her obituary, the New York Times said, “Her books were not profound, but they were vivid and had a sound sociological basis. She was among the best-read novelists in the nation, and critics of the 1920s and ‘30s did not hesitate to call her the greatest American woman novelist of her day.”
Ferber herself once wrote, “Those critics or well-wishers who think that I could have written better than I have are flattering me. Always I have written at the top of my bent at that particular time. It may be that this or that, written five years later or one year earlier, or under different circumstances, might have been the better for it. But one writes as the opportunity and the material and the inclination shape themselves. This is certain: I never have written a line except to please myself. I never have written with an eye to what is called the public or the market or the trend or the editor or the reviewer. Good or bad, popular or unpopular, lasting or ephemeral, the words I have put down on paper were the best words I could summon at the time to express the thing I wanted more than anything else to say.”
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Also by Edna Ferber
Great Son
American Beauty
Cimarron
Show Boat
So Big
Giant
Ice Palace
Copyright
SARATOGA TRUNK. Copyright © 1941, 1968 by Edna Ferber. Copyright renewed © 1969 by Harriet F. Pilpel as Executrix of the Estate of Edna Ferber. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Perennial Classics edition published 2000.
Perennia
l Classics are published by Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN 0-06-095671-2
EPub Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780062310316
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00 01 02 03 04 ❖/RRD 10 987654321
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