A Peculiar Treasure

The novelist, short-story writer, and playwright Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and grew up in small Midwestern towns, the daughter of a Jewish shopkeeper who had immigrated from Hungary. As a Jewish girl in the American Protestant heartland, she faced antisemitism on a daily basis, an experience that she transmuted into her novels, which frequently feature characters who are victims of discrimination because of their ethnicity or race. Ferber quit school at seventeen and worked as a journalist before turning to fiction. In 1925, her novel So Big (1924) won the Pulitzer Prize. Her 1926 novel, Show Boat, became a successful musical. Her heroines are almost always strong, assertive women; she also wrote about women who were successful in business. In the 1930s, she offered a strong voice of public concern about Nazism. Ferber was a member of the New York collective of actors, critics, writers, and wits known as the Algonquin Round Table. Several of her novels, including So Big, Cimarron (1929), and Giant (1952), were turned into successful Hollywood films. Her autobiography, Fanny Herself (1917), is forthright in her articulation of her Jewish identity and her sympathy for the working class.