“Life can’t ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death — fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant; the more varied the moods, the richer the experience. I’ve learned to value every stab of pain and disappointment.” —Edna Ferber
Edna Ferber (1885-1968) was one of the most widely read authors in America, known to readers as a faithful chronicler of working people who sought to free themselves from forces that threatened them and the rapidly changing world around them. Painting nuanced characters, her novels “focused on American heroines venturing into the workplace, and how that affected the supposed harmony of the sexes,” according to her grand-niece Julie Gilbert, author of the 2024 book Giant Love: Edna Ferber. Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the making of an American Classic Film.
Ferber was a proud Jewish woman who shunned sexist traditions of domestic servitude in a time when it was anachronistic to defy such conventions. Proudly beating against the currents of her time, Ferber vigorously supported women’s suffrage, child labor laws and the fight against Nazism and fascism. She criticized the yellowing of journalistic standards in murder trials for creating a circus-like atmosphere which would become all too common since her passing, as well as the injustices of the legal system in cases such as the notorious trial of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, which many people still believe was a racist, anti-immigrant political frame-up.
Gilbert characterizes her great-aunt as “a tank for when it came to important creative people defending American liberties.”
Edna Ferber was born on Aug. 15, 1885 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The second child of Jacob Ferber, a Hungarian-born Jewish merchant who moved to the States when he was 17, and Julia Ferber, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin of Jewish-German ancestry. Her parents had already settled on the name “Edward Victor” and were surprised by the birth of a girl, changing the name to “Edna” upon delivery.
For Michigan in the late 1800s, Gilbert points out, “[T]he standards for a girl were comely, calm, neat, frugal, and, perhaps, musical. She would learn the domestic arts of sewing, cooking, and housekeeping. She could be clever enough without an intellectual bent. If she knew sums, it would be all the more meritorious later on, when at a marriageable age she would already know how to manage a household.”
During childhood, Ferber’s “nomadic family” moved across the Midwest in search of what some call the American Dream. Leaving Kalamazoo for greener pastures, the family settled their sights on Chicago, thinking the move to open a general store would improve their fortunes. When that venture failed after six years, they moved again, this time to Ottumwa, Iowa.
In stark contrast to the warm hospitality for which the Midwest has a reputation, the young Ferber encountered what Gilbert calls “raw antisemitism.” Walking through the cornfields to school every day, the other children taunted her with the cruel names they learned from their parents. According to Gilbert, Ferber would see a “golden-haired girl” sitting on a farm fence post, repeatedly and mercilessly shouting slurs at her. Adult men joined their taunting, yelling in mock Yiddish accents, even spitting on her.
“Although at the time Ferber had no defense, no retorts, she was able to build up an arsenal of outrage against any and every kind of prejudice,” writes Gilbert, author of the 2024 book Giant Love: Edna Ferber. “It became a battleground within her. She had to consistently expose, examine, and attempt to disarm the scourge of racism.”
As an adult in the late 1920s, Ferber visited Ottumwa again. “For the first time in my life, out of the deep well of depression where they had so long festered, I dragged those seven years of my bitter little girlhood and looked at them,” she wrote. “And the cool, clean Iowa air cleansed them, and I saw them, not as bitter and corroding years but as astringent, strengthening years, years whose adversity has given me and mine a solid foundation of stamina, determination and a profound love of justice.”
Ferber herself wrote that, “My mother kept a sort of skeleton diary through the years, and the scant line-a-day covering the Ottumwa years forms a human document, bare as it is, containing all the elements of courage, vitality, humor, sordid tragedy, high tragedy.
“Through it all, I may add, the Ferber family went to the theater. Bitter Iowa winters, burning Iowa summers; death, business crises, illness — the Ferber family went to the theater when any form of theater was to be had in the boundaries of that then-benighted little town.”
The Panic of 1893 caused the worst depression the country would know until the Great Depression of the 1930s. In a time when workers had little to no legal protections, there were protest marches on Washington D.C. calling for the creation of federal jobs to counter mass unemployment, a radical idea for the time. The most famous of these was “Coxey’s Army,” led by Ohio businessman Jacob Coxey and his reserve of the unemployed. Another was “Kelly’s Army,” led by “General” James Kelly and consisting of more than 1,400 men trekking from California to D.C.
In 1894, Ferber witnessed Kelly’s Army float down the Des Moines River on rafts they built during a stop in Des Moines. Among them was 18-year-old Jack London, who wrote about the experience in his 1907 book The Road. They were ignored by their government, but the battle had just begun. A victory was achieved when the New Deal under the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration established federal works programs.
Dipping back into the well of memories from her time in Ottumwa, Ferber writes, “It is not for me to say whether all this was good or bad for me. Probably bad and good. Certainly it made for an interesting childhood.”
When she was 10, the family resettled in Appleton, Wisconsin to open a general store. Ferber quit high school at 17 to work as a reporter for the Appleton Daily Crescent newspaper. After a year and a half at the Crescent, a new city editor named Paul Hunter fired her because, as she recalls, he “didn’t want a self-dramatizing Girl Reporter around the place.”
She was quickly scooped up by the Milwaukee Journal. A notorious workaholic even in her teens, the job took a toll on Ferber’s health, and she suffered anemia. While recuperating, what was supposed to be a temporary leave of absence marked a turning point when she sold her first short story, “The Homely Heroine,” published by the now defunct Everybody’s Magazine.
Ferber originally had aspirations for a life in the theater as an actress. She considered taking elocution lessons and focusing on studies to fulfill her youthful ambitions.
“I never had wanted to be a writer,” Ferber confesses in her 1939 memoir A Peculiar Treasure. “I couldn’t even use a typewriter, never having tried. The stage was my one love… I go to the theater because I love it; I write plays for the theater because I love it. I am still wrapped in my childish dream [of being an actress, but] … At 17 my writing career accidentally began.”
In 1911, she published her first novel, Dawn O’Hara, The Girl Who Laughed, a Milwaukee-based story about a young woman who had been a reporter. A series of Ferber’s stories featuring Mrs. Emma McChesney, an ambitious salesperson who relies on her wits and style to climb up the business ladder, and her son Jock appeared in some of the biggest publications of the day, such as American Magazine and Cosmopolitan. The stories were later collected and published in three volumes.
Tired of writing about the exploits of Mrs. McChesney, Ferber turned down lucrative offers to write more installments. She did bring McChesney back to life in the 1915 stage play Our Mrs. McChesney, collaborating with George V. Hobart.
When New York Times drama critic and playwright George S. Kaufman read Ferber’s short story “Old Man Minick,” he asked her to collaborate with him to bring it to the stage. The result was Minick (1924), which received critical acclaim on Broadway. Despite their differences, Ferber said they were both “work worshippers,” and the pair would enjoy other successful collaborations, including The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932) and Stage Door (1936), among others. She was a member of the famed Algonquin Roundtable, bolstering writers and critics such as Dorothy Parker, Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley, and future contributors to the New Yorker magazine.
After Ferber’s novel So Big won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize, Ferber wrote the wildly successful Show Boat (1926), which was adapted for a Broadway musical the following year and at least three films. Drawing from her vivid firsthand experiences, the flood described in her novel is based on the rising water of the Des Moines River in Ottumwa and the Mississippi: “I knew how the rivers behaved. I saw bridges as they swayed, crackled, then, with screams of despair, were swept downstream… I saw houses tossing like toys in midstream… People… marooned on housetops.”
Ferber’s subsequent works have been collectively described as “social histories,” such as: Cimmaron (1930), American Beauty (1931), Come and Get It (1935), Saratoga Trunk (1941) and Great Son (1945).
In the 1920s, Ferber, who had regularly visited Europe for over a decade, was alarmed to find the anti-Jewish prejudice that terrorized her family in childhood was now being promoted on the political stage under the Nazi Party.
While researching for the novel Come and Get It, which exposes the plundering of the Earth by ruthless robber barons as experienced by a family operating a lumber mill and paper-making company set in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, she visited the home of a German-born lumber baron. She had yet to grasp the spread of Hitler’s “poisonous doctrine” in America.
At the dinner table, her host professed his belief in the crackpot drivel found in the long-debunked forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, promoting the venomous lie that all bankers are Jewish, Jews horde the world’s wealth and seek global domination. Ferber, fearing for her personal safety, locked her guest bedroom door, wedging a chair beneath the doorknob. The next morning, the host refused to engage in conversation and tried to prevent her from visiting another lumber camp.
When A Peculiar Treasure was published in 1939, the United States had not entered the war against the Axis of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan, but the escalation of antisemitism in Europe, a tragic and bloody plague for thousands of years, was being carried out as a state-sponsored campaign of terror and mass murder that would culminate in an industrialized genocide of millions.
Ferber could not ignore the news of the Nazi pogroms under Adolf Hitler’s seizure of Germany and the other countries that fell under its occupation. She ridiculed the “pathological madman” Hitler and his “toadlike” minister of propaganda Josef Goebbels while treating them as deadly serious threats to all of humanity.
“All my life I have lived, walked, talked, worked as I wished,” Ferber writes. “I should refuse to live in a world in which I could no longer say this. Since 1933 the whole German people have been slaves. And in those years not a line of beautiful poetry, not a page of stirring or important imaginative writing, not a piece of great or even good music, not a single fine painting has come out of the German nation.”
That last line is likely a poignant jab at the Fuhrer, as the Nazi leader was a failed painter in a previous life.
These horrors stirred in her a deeper sense of pride as a Jewish woman, sensing others would unite from around the globe, feeling as she did, asserting one’s self in the face of hostility and death.
“For, paradoxical though it may seem, in spite of the degradation of the body, the humiliation of the spirit, the agony of mind, the torture of the soul which has been visited upon the Jews of the so-called civilized world in the past five years, the gorgeous irony of it is this: Adolf Hitler has done more to strengthen, to unite, to solidify and to spiritualize the Jews of the world than any other man since Moses.”
In the post-war period, Ferber’s fame and output both began to wane. Her 1952 epic novel Giant courted controversy by examining Texas’s nouveau riche, while a film adaptation starring James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor garnered nine Oscar nominations.
As noted by Charles Taylor in the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2022, the novel has a peculiar resonance today: “What Ferber saw in Texas was not just a state eager to keep women and racial minorities in their place but one that proudly considered itself separate from — better than — America. And thus, she unknowingly grasped one of the key truths at the heart of Trumpism — the other great pandemic of our present moment.”
Ferber’s last novel Ice Palace (1958), set in Alaska, has been credited with giving a boost to the statehood for Alaska movement. Along with her first memoir, she wrote a second, A Kind of Magic, published in 1963. She died on April 16, 1968 at the age of 82.
Ferber wrote in 1939, “It has been my privilege, then, to have been a human being on the planet Earth; and to have been an American, a writer, a Jew.” But she noted that her time growing up in Iowa left permanent scars. Ottumwa “must be held accountable for anything in me that is hostile toward the world.”
A shorter version of this article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2025 Peak Iowa issue, a collection of stories drawn from Hawkeye State history, culture and legend. Browse dozens of Peak Iowa tales here.
