Good evening and welcome to our show.

Tonight I want to feature Edna Ferber and three of her works.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright.

Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize Winning So Big.

Showboat, Cimarron, which was adapted into the 1931 film which won an Academy Award for Best Picture.

Giant also made into a film in 1956.

And Ice Palace.

Thurber's life was as interesting as her novels.

She was born in Michigan in 1885, and she died at her home in New York City of stomach cancer.

Ferber, never married, had no children and is not known to have engaged in a romance.

As a young girl, her family frequently moved in a Ottumwa, Iowa.

Ferber was ages five through 12.

She and her family faced brutal anti-Semitism, including adult males verbally abusing, mocking and spitting on her when she brought lunch to her father, often mocking her Yiddish accent.

She noted her years in the town “must be held accountable for anything in me that is hostile to the world.

” Ferbers family could not afford to send her to college, and on the spur of the moment she took a job as a cub reporter for the newspaper in Appleton, Wisconsin.

A bout of anemia ended her reporting career.

While recovering from the anemia, she began writing and selling short stories to various magazines, as they say, the rest is history.

Ferber was known to be outspoken and blessed with a quick wit once after a man joked about how her suit made her resemble a man.

She replied, “So does yours.

” Ferbers novels that I have read feature a strong female character who overcomes many challenges and difficulties, often caused or based on her marriage, to a man who, while handsome, talented and charismatic, was also a dreamer, a drinker, a gambler, an adventurer, and who was often absent from the family home because of a severe case of wanderlust.

I first read Showboat, which was originally copyrighted in 1926.

In the introduction, Ferber wrote that the book was neither history nor biography but fiction, primarily based around life on a showboat, the Cotton Blossom, floating palace that floated up and down the Mississippi River for decades.

Ferber tells the story of Magnolia Hawks Ravenal, her parents, her husband and daughter, Kim.

I found this to be a fascinating book of a certain era of time and a particular lifestyle.

I will warn you, Ferber writes with the Common language of her time and her treatment of African-Americans can be offputting, if not offensive.

In So Big, which was copyrighted in 1924.

Ferber again features a strong female character, Selina Peake De Jong, who on the shooting death of her father in a gambling hall, becomes a teenage teacher in a Dutch school ten miles outside of Chicago at $30 per month.

As the book progresses, Selina becomes a wife, a mother and then a widow, forced to make a living, growing vegetables on 25 acres of poor soil.

Along the way, she emulates the strength of character and determination that is passed on to her son, Dirk De Jong, who as a very young boy would tell his mother he was “so big ”.

Finally there is Cimarron, which was originally copyrighted in 1929.

Here the heroine is Sabra Venable Cravat.

This book was fun for me because of the multiple references to Kansas and Wichita in particular.

Sabra's family was from Wichita.

Sabra's husband convinces her to leave the middle class respectability of Wichita, Kansas, to begin a new life in the Oklahoma territory.

Life in the frontier town of Osage is less than ideal, but Sabra succeeds.

This book addresses life on the frontier, lawyering in that frontier, publishing a small town newspaper, and dealing with the discovery of oil and how it impacted the Native Americans who had been sent off to a few acres of reservation.

In this regard, see David Grann's wonderfully remarkable book, Killers of the Flower Moon.

That's our show.

We have featured the author, Edna Ferber, and three of her books written almost 100 years ago.

Good night.

See you next time here on Inside the Cover.