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Edna Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Mich., Aug. 15, 1885, the daughter of a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper, Jacob Ferber, and his Milwaukee-born wife, Julia Neumann Ferber. In some sources, perhaps because of vanity, she claimed to have been born in 1887, but census documents show otherwise. She spent her early years in Chicago and Ottumwa, Iowa. At age 12, she moved to Appleton, Wis., where her father ran a general store called My Store. She expressed her writing talents early as "personal and local" editor of her high school newspaper, the Ryan Clarion. When she graduated from Ryan High, her senior essay so impressed the editor of the Appleton Daily Crescent that he offered her a job as a reporter at age 17, for the salary of $3.00 per week. Limited by family finances from pursuing her real dream -- studying at Northwestern University's School of Elocution for a career on stage -- she took the job. After being fired by the Crescent, she went on to write for the Milwaukee Journal, where she worked so hard that one day she collapsed in exhaustion. While home in Appleton recuperating from anemia, she wrote her first short story and her first novel. In 1910, Everybody's Magazine published the short story, The Homely Heroine, set in Appleton. Her novel, Dawn O'Hara, the story of a newspaperwoman in Milwaukee, followed in 1911. She gained national attention for her series of Emma McChesney stories, tales of a traveling underskirt saleswoman that were published in national magazines. She wrote 30 Emma stories before finally refusing to do any more. Her first play, Our Mrs. McChesney, was produced in 1915, starring Ethel Barrymore. Ferber was a prolific and popular novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for So Big, the story of a woman raising a child on a truck farm outside of Chicago. Others of her best known books include Showboat (1926), Cimarron (1929), Giant (1952) and Ice Palace (1958). Showboat, about a girl's life on the floating theater of the Mississippi River, was made into a musical comedy on Broadway and three motion pictures. So Big was adapted into two films. Giant, a story of life in Texas, starred Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson on the big screen and was James Dean's last movie. Ferber wrote two autobiographies -- A Peculiar Treasure published in 1939 and A Kind of Magic in 1963. She died of cancer at age 82 on April 16, 1968, at her Park Avenue, New York, home. In a lengthy 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." |
