Edna Ferber

 I have not read Edna Ferber. I know she wrote Giant, and I have seen that movie. I think she wrote Showboat, and I have seen that move, too.

It may be here is one of those writers where fashion has obscured talent. Jstor's Revisiting Edna Ferber leads me to that conclusion for the following reasons:

In her review of Eliza McGraw’s 2014 book, Edna Ferber’s America, in “Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature,” Lori Harrison-Kahan observes how the author was scorned both for being a woman and for being a Jew, noting that “a chorus of critical voices, most of them male” dismissed Ferber’s “crowd-pleasing plots as well as her hyperbolic, though accessible, writing style.” F. Scott Fitzgerald refused even to “read her wildly popular stories, derisively labeling her one of the ‘Yiddish descendants of O. Henry.’” In his 1960 Partisan Review essay “Masscult and Midcult,” Dwight Macdonald offered his notorious assessment of middlebrow writers, stating that their work “really isn’t culture at all” but “a parody of High Culture;” he placed Ferber at the top of his “list of writers who should not be taken seriously.” One hopes that these men, if they were still alive, would be embarrassed at having made such fatuous statements. Regardless, they were missing out. Ferber’s prose is a delight, and now, with Belt Publishing’s reissue of The Girls, more readers will get the opportunity to see that.

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Certainly, Ferber’s approach—critical but forgiving to individual people and America at large—stems largely from who she was as a person and the way in which she moved through the world as a feme sole. A firsthand expert on the old maid lifestyle herself, Ferber was never known to have had a romantic or sexual relationship. But far from being a sad, sere figure whom life was passing by, she was vibrant, indefatigable, witty, and successful, a member of the Algonquin Round Table in New York and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for So Big, another wonderful Chicago novel. She saw that book eventually adapted into one silent picture and two talkies. Her 1926 novel Show Boat was made into the famous 1927 musical, and Cimarron (1930), Giant (1952), and The Ice Palace (1958) were all adapted into films as well. When novelist Joseph Conrad encountered her on a visit to the States in 1923, he wrote that, “it was a great pleasure to meet Miss Ferber. The quality of her work is [as] undeniable as her personality.”

Think about that - Joseph Conrad was an admirer. I call that a great endorsement.

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