Edna Ferber  (1885 - 1968)

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So Big by  Edna Ferber

Winner of the 1924 Pulitzer Prize, So Big is widely regarded as Edna Ferber's crowning achievement. A rollicking panorama of Chicago's high and low life, this stunning novel follows the travails of gambler's daughter Selina Peake DeJong as she struggles to maintain her dignity, her family, and her sanity in the face of monumental challenges.

"A novel to read and to remember." -- New York Times

"A masterpiece...It has the completeness, [the] finality, that grips and exalts and convinces." -- Literary Review

Ice Palace by  Edna Ferber

This is the story of Alaska before statehood, in all its glory, beauty and bleakness...where men pitted themselves against the elements and the wilds, only to find the greatest threat is from "outside."

The original author of such screen classics as Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant, and coauthor with George S. Kaufman of Dinner at Eight and Stage Door, Edna Ferber (1885-1968) was among the most popular and acclaimed American novelists between World War I and World War II, as well as a noted playwright, short-story writer, and charter member of the Algonquin Round Table. She is also the author of Saratoga Trunk.  Edna Ferber is one of the best-selling novelists of this century, including her Pulitzer Prize novel So Big.

Edna Ferber Bibliography

Edna Ferber

Appleton Public Library

Excerpt:

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...

Edna Ferber Letters to Flora Mae Holly:  1911 - 1941

University of Delaware

The collection of American writer Edna Ferber's letters to New York literary agent Flora Mae Holly (d. 1960) includes six items and spans the dates 1911-1941. All of Ferber's letters are typed and signed. In addition, there is an unsigned, typed response to Ferber from Holly on the back of the April 15, 1938 letter.

The Project Gutenberg E-text of Fanny Herself

By Edna Ferber

Excerpt:

It has become the fashion among novelists to introduce their hero in knee pants, their heroine in pinafore and pigtails. Time was when we were rushed up to a stalwart young man of twenty-four, who was presented as the pivot about whom the plot would revolve. Now we are led, protesting, up to a grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him through twenty years of intimate minutiae. In extreme cases we have been obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so often English), from shorts to Etons...

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