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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

Edna Ferber

by Ralph L. Langenheim Jr.

Other literary forms

In addition to twelve novels, Edna Ferber wrote eight plays, two novellas, eighty-three short stories, and two autobiographies. Although her novels have perhaps been the most enduring part of her work, her short stories and plays were equally or more important during her lifetime. Almost all her works, except the dramas, first appeared serially in magazines. In addition, she wrote numerous short articles and commentaries. Twenty-two Emma McChesney stories made Ferber a best-selling writer. These were first published in The American Magazine or Cosmopolitan between 1911 and 1915 and later were collected in Roast Beef Medium (1913), Personality Plus (1914), and Emma McChesney and Co. (1915). Emma McChesney also was the heroine of Our Mrs. McChesney (pr., pb. 1915), Ferber’s first play, which she wrote with George V. Hobart.

Edna Ferber.

ph_0111207078-Ferber.jpg

(Library of Congress)

The McChesney character was a significant innovation—the first successful businesswoman depicted in popular American literature. Finally, however, Ferber declined Cosmopolitan’s proffered contract for as many McChesney stories as she wished to write at a price she could name. Ferber saw herself, instead, as a novelist and dramatist. The plays she wrote with George S. Kaufman, especially Dinner at Eight (pr., pb. 1932), The Royal Family (pr. 1927), and Stage Door (pr., pb. 1936), enjoyed long Broadway runs and secured her fame as a dramatist. Her autobiographies, A Peculiar Treasure (1939, 1960) and A Kind of Magic (1963), explain her motivations and detail her writing techniques. The books also are intensely personal and revealing. The second, written after her health began to deteriorate, is rambling and repetitive but essentially completes the story of her active life.

Achievements

Edna Ferber maintained herself as a best-selling author and a popular celebrity from the appearance of the Emma McChesney stories in 1911 to the publication of Ice Palace in 1958. During this period, she was cited several times as America’s best woman novelist, and literary notables such as William Allen Wright, Rudyard Kipling, and James M. Barrie praised her work. Her reputation, however, abruptly declined in the late 1960’s. A resurgence in interest in Ferber’s work began in the 1980’s, fueled mostly by the publicity surrounding her participation in several social crusades. Her advocacy of social and political causes in her fiction significantly influenced public opinion and policy. Ernest Gruening, territorial senator-elect of Alaska, for example, cited Ferber’s Ice Palace as important in winning Alaska’s statehood.

Ferber’s explication of regional history and culture in her novels also played a prominent part in raising pride in American culture after World War I. Her short story “April Twenty-fifth as Usual” (first published in Ladies’ Home Journal in July, 1918) received the O. Henry Award in 1919, and in 1925, her novel So Big won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s classic musical play Show Boat (pr. 1927), based on Ferber’s novel, was the first American musical with a serious plot derived from a literary source. The story also was used in a successful radio serial program and four films; it made so much money that Ferber referred to it as her “oil well.” She associated with many prominent theatrical, literary, and political figures, including members of the Algonquin Round Table, a circle of literary friends who met for lunch regularly at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. At least twenty-seven films have been based on her works.

Biography

Edna Jessica Ferber was the second daughter of a Hungarian Jewish immigrant storekeeper, Jacob Charles Ferber, and Julia Neuman Ferber, daughter of a prosperous, cultured German Jewish family. She was named Edna because the family, hoping for a male child, had already selected the name Edward. When she was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, her father owned and operated a general store. Soon the business faltered, and the family moved in with Julia’s parents in Chicago. The family moved subsequently to Ottumwa, Iowa, then back to Chicago, then to Appleton, Wisconsin, but Jacob Ferber still failed to prosper as a storekeeper. Though intelligent, kindly, and cultured, he never acquired business skills; in addition, he soon lost his sight. Julia assumed management of the business and became the head of the family. With great personal effort and the active assistance of Edna, she stabilized the business, paid off debts, and maintained the family’s independence.

Edna Ferber later described Ottumwa as narrow-minded and sordid. There she experienced anti-Semitism and witnessed a lynching. During her high school years in Appleton, in contrast, she enjoyed pleasant, tolerant, midwestern small-town life. Unable to afford college tuition in 1902, she began her professional writing career as a reporter for the Appleton Daily Crescent. Eighteen months later, the editor who had hired her—on the strength of her reportorial writing in her high school paper—left the newspaper, and Ferber was fired. The most credible reason given for her dismissal was her imaginative “embroidering” of news reports. She then became a reporter on the Milwaukee Journal. Exhausted by overwork and anemia, she returned home in 1905 and began writing fiction. High school and about five years of newspaper writing constituted Ferber’s entire preparation for her literary career.

After Jacob Ferber’s death in 1909, Julia sold the store and took her two daughters to Chicago. There, while her mother and sister earned their living, Edna continued writing. In 1912, after selling some of her work, she moved to New York City, but she remained closely attached to her mother. Thereafter, she and her mother resided in hotels or apartments in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere but considered themselves New Yorkers. Though they did not always actually live together, their lives were closely intertwined. In 1938, Edna, who never married, built a house for herself in suburban Connecticut, pointedly leaving her mother in a New York apartment. After Julia died, Edna sold her house and returned to New York to live, taking an apartment. During the last ten years of her life, a painful nervous disorder impaired her writing. She died of stomach cancer in New York City on April 16, 1968.

Analysis

Edna Ferber was a feminist, a conservationist, a crusader for minorities and immigrants, and a staunch believer in the work ethic and American culture. Strong women characters rising above the limitations of birth and gender dominate her novels; most men in her works are weak, and many desert their women and children. Ferber’s fiction describes and condemns mistreatment of African Americans, Jews, Latinos, and Native Americans. Her novels decry unrestrained capitalism and wasteful exploitation of natural resources while celebrating regional culture and history in an effective and pleasing style that clearly reflects her journalistic background. Her characterization, however, is less effective, and her plots tend toward melodrama and coincidence.

All of Ferber’s novels were commercial successes, and many remained in print for decades after their first publication. Her first novels, Dawn O’Hara and Fanny Herself, are strongly autobiographical. They remain interesting because they show Ferber’s literary growth. The background material in Great Son, a later work, is sketchy, the characters are stereotypical, and the plot is contrived. At the time of that novel’s writing, during World War II, Ferber was preoccupied with writing propaganda to help in the war effort. Her final novel, Ice Palace, is a political tract of little literary merit; Ferber was ill at the time of its writing.

The Girls

Ferber expected The Girls to be a best seller and considered it her best novel. The story recounts six decades of Chicago middle-class history and intergenerational conflict. Charlotte Thrift, forbidden to marry an unsuitable boy, loses him to death in the American Civil War. She never marries. Her unmarried niece, Lottie, under her mother’s domination, keeps house for her mother and aunt. Lottie finally rebels, joins the Red Cross during World War I, has a brief affair, and returns with her illegitimate daughter, whom she passes off as a French orphan. Charly (Charlotte), Lottie’s niece, falls in love with a poet, who is killed in World War I, and moves in with her aunt and great-aunt. All three of these women are strong personalities, whereas their men are either incompetent boors or scoundrels.

So Big

Ferber’s first best seller, So Big, effectively contrasts humble life in the Halstead Street Market with that of pretentious Chicago society. A genteelly reared orphan, Selina Peake, goes to teach school in a community of Dutch market gardeners, where she must adjust to a brutal existence. Her only intellectual companion is thirteen-year-old Roelf, the artistically talented son of the family with whom she lives. After a year, she marries kindly Pervus DeJong, an unimaginative, unenterprising widower. They have a son, Dirk, nicknamed So Big. After Pervus’s death, Selina makes their farm a thriving success. She sacrifices all for So Big, who, after a few years as a struggling architect, shifts to a banking career and high society. In contrast, Selina’s first protégé, Roelf, becomes a famous sculptor. At the end, So Big finally realizes that his life is empty. Although the novel was critically acclaimed, the characterization barely develops beyond stereotypes, and many of the anecdotes presented in the work are clichés.

Show Boat

Show Boat describes life aboard late nineteenth and early twentieth century Mississippi River showboats and addresses the cultural significance of these centers of entertainment. Magnolia Hawkes, daughter of Captain Andy and Parthenia Hawkes of the showboat Cotton Blossom, marries Gaylord Ravenal, a charming professional gambler. After Captain Andy’s death, Magnolia, Gaylord, and their daughter, Kim, move to Chicago, where they squander Magnolia’s inheritance. Magnolia, deserted by her wastrel husband, becomes a successful singer and raises Kim to become a successful serious actor. Parthenia inherits and successfully operates the showboat. Parthenia, Magnolia, and Kim are all protofeminist career women. Captain Andy, though competent and wise, defers to Parthenia in almost everything.

In Show Boat, Ferber depicts African Americans as patient, upright, and hardworking people. A tragic incident of miscegenation and the injustice of the laws in the American South balance the romanticized account of showboat life, which is charming.

Cimarron

Cimarron is set in Oklahoma in the period between the 1889 land rush and the 1920’s oil boom. Sabra Cravat begins life as a genteel, impoverished southern girl but ends up an assured newspaperwoman and member of the U.S. Congress. Her husband, Yancey Cravat, a flamboyant lawyer-newspaperman of dubious background, starts grandiose projects, performs heroic acts, and upholds high ideals, but he accomplishes little. Desertion of his family clears the way for Sabra’s rise. These characters exemplify the tension between those who “won” Oklahoma and those who “civilized” it. In addition, in this work interaction between Native Americans and European Americans is perceptively treated.

American Beauty

Ferber rhapsodically describes the Connecticut landscape in American Beauty, in which she also chronicles the abuse of land and resources. She presents Polish immigrant culture sympathetically, whereas she depicts the indigenous New Englanders as played-out aristocrats. Judy Oakes and her niece, Tamar Pring, are strong, stubborn women devoted to their aristocratic background and ancestral home. Their hired man, Ondy Olszak, a kindhearted, hardworking, unimaginative Polish immigrant, maintains the farm at just above subsistence level. Tamar seduces and marries Ondy, and their son Orrange combines Ondy’s peasant vigor and Tamar’s cultural sensibilities. Although Orrange inherits the farm, Ondy’s family forces him to sell. Millionaire True Baldwin, who, as an impoverished farm lad, had aspired to marry Judy Oakes, buys it. Fortunately, Baldwin’s architect daughter, Candy Baldwin, who is sexually attracted to Orrange, hires him to manage the farm.

Come and Get It

Ferber draws heavily on her own background in Come and Get It, a story of resource exploitation, unrestrained capitalism, and social contrast. After lumberjack Barney Glasgow fights his way up to a managerial position at the mill, he marries his boss’s spinsterish daughter. The mill’s timbering and papermaking thrive under his direction, until he is fatally attracted to Lotta Lindaback, granddaughter of his longtime lumberjack pal Swan Bostrom. Barney’s daughter, frustrated by unacknowledged desire for her father, marries a dull young businessman. Bernard, Barney’s son, pursues Lotta when Barney restrains his own passion for her. Barney then fights with Bernard and expels him from the house. Immediately afterward, Barney and his family are killed in an explosion. Bernard marries Lotta and builds an industrial empire in steel and paper. Lotta, meanwhile, enters international high society. The Great Depression forces Lotta’s return to Wisconsin, where her twins come under the influence of Tom Melendy, an idealistic young man from a mill-hand family. Rejecting their parents’ materialism, the twins return to the simple Bostrom ways.

Saratoga Trunk

In Saratoga Trunk, Ferber decries the evils of unrestrained capitalism and the decadent snobbery of New Orleans high society. She also promotes women’s causes and the conservation of natural resources. Illegitimate Clio Dulain and Texas cowboy-gambler Clint Maroon join forces to extort money from Clio’s aristocratic father. They then move to Saratoga, New York, where Clio sets out to snare a rich husband. Although she entraps railroad millionaire Van Steed, she drops him for Clint when Clint is injured fighting for Van Steed’s railroad, the Saratoga Trunk. Thereafter, Clio and Clint become railroad millionaires but idealistically give their wealth to charity. Clio subtly manipulates Clint in all important matters.

Giant

Giant, Ferber’s flamboyant version of Texas history and culture, exemplifies the Texas mythology; upon publication, the novel earned violent protests from Texans. Ferber’s typical strong female central character, Leslie Lynnton, daughter of a world-famous doctor living in genteel shabbiness, is swept off her feet by a visiting Texas rancher. Transported to his gigantic ranch, she finds her husband ruled by his spinster sister, Luz. Luz dies violently, and, with great skill and wisdom, Leslie guides her man through repeated crises as the great cattle and cotton “empires” are hemmed in by vulgar oil billionaires. In this novel, Ferber shows the original Texans, Mexican Americans, as deeply wronged, patient, dignified, and noble. Unfortunately, the book’s ending leaves ongoing problems unsolved.

Bibliography

1 

Antler, Joyce. The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century. New York: Free Press, 1997. Ferber is one of the fifty women profiled in this overview of the lives of American Jewish women in the 1890’s and the twentieth century.

2 

Batker, Carol. “Literary Reformers: Crossing Class and Ethnic Boundaries in Jewish Women’s Fiction of the 1920’s.” MELUS 25, no.1 (Spring, 2000): 81-104. Analyzes the work of Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Anzia Yezierska, focusing on how Ferber depicted African American characters and class mobility.

3 

Bloom, Harold, ed. Jewish Women Fiction Writers. New York: Chelsea House, 1998. Provides biographical information, a wide selection of critical excerpts, and complete bibliographies of Ferber and nine other female Jewish American writers. Designed for high school and undergraduate students.

4 

Botshon, Lisa, and Meredith Goldsmith, eds. Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920’s. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Collection of essays examines the work of writers who were both critically acclaimed and commercially successful in the 1920’s. Two chapters are devoted to Ferber: One discusses the “middlebrow regional fiction” of Ferber and Rose Wilder Lane; the other analyzes Ferber’s novel Cimarron.

5 

Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith. Ferber: Edna Ferber and Her Circle—A Biography. New York: Applause, 1999. Well-researched biography calls Ferber a romantic realist. Notes that she was not opposed to working with the system, yet she created her own unique niche within it. Includes an index.

6 

Meade, Marion. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2004. Offers a nonscholarly, entertaining look at Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Zelda Fitzgerald, chronicling the lives of these writers in the “Roaring Twenties.”

7 

Shaughnessy, Mary Rose. Women and Success in American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber. New York: Gordon Press, 1977. Examination of Ferber’s life and work provides an assessment of the author’s place in the women’s movement.

8 

Watts, Eileen. “Edna Ferber, Jewish American Writer: Who Knew?” In Modern Jewish Women Writers in America, edited by Evelyn Avery. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Essay interpreting Ferber’s work from the perspective of her Jewish heritage is included in a collection devoted to the discussion of American women writers whose lives and work have been influenced by Judaism.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Langenheim, Ralph L. "Edna Ferber." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_12100140000141.
APA 7th
Langenheim, R. L. (2010). Edna Ferber. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Langenheim, Ralph L. "Edna Ferber." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 19, 2026. online.salempress.com.