Ferber, Edna (1887-1968)

American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright, whose works serve as a chronicle of American life in the early 20th century. Her 1924 novel, So Big, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1925. Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. After graduating from Ryan High School in Appleton, Wisconsin, she became the first female journalist for the Appleton Daily Crescent. She later worked for the Milwaukee Journal and the Chicago Tribune. Ferber discarded the manuscript for her first novel, Dawn O'Hara, the Girl Who Laughed (1911), but her mother retrieved it and submitted it to a publisher. In Fanny Herself (1917) Ferber directly addresses the issue of anti-Semitism, showing her characters gaining strength through adversity. The best-selling novel So Big (1924) chronicles the life of a hardworking, principled farm woman and her materialistic son. Many of Ferber's works were adapted as motion pictures, including Show Boat (1926), about a late-19th-century Mississippi river showboat (filmed in 1936, remade 1951); Cimarron (1930), set during the late-19th-century land boom in Oklahoma (filmed in 1931, remade 1960); Giant (1952), about a wealthy Texas rancher (filmed in 1956); and Ice Palace (1958), which is set in Alaska and credited with helping that territory gain statehood in 1959 (filmed in 1960). Ferber also wrote stage plays, the majority in collaboration with American playwright George S. Kaufman. She was working on a novel about Native Americans when she died of cancer in 1968.