Pulitzer Prize Author Dead

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31658, 19 April 1968, Page 4

Pulitzer Prize Author Dead

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—CopgrigM)

NEW YORK, April 17. The novelist and playwright, Edna Ferber, whose larger-than-life portrayals of American life earned her a fortune, has died at the age of 80.

Miss Ferber wop the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 with her novel “So Big,” but her most enduring work was the novel, “Show Boat,” which first became a play, with music by Jerome Kern, then a film, and, finally, a radio series. It was daring for its times because it dealt with racial discrimination. Altogether, Miss Ferber wrote 23 novels, most of them grist for the movie mill, over a span of nearly 60 years. She had six plays to her credit, including “The Royal Family,” “Dinner at Eight,” “Stage Door,” and “The Land Is Bright.” Her last novel, “A Kind of Magic,” was published in 1963. A British critic once de-

scribed Miss Ferber as “the novel reader’s John Gunther” because of her proclivity for locale writing. She moved from district to district, choosing turbulent moments of American history to create fiction with broad strokes of colour, action and romance. Like the good journalist she was in her youth, she published “Ice Palace,” a riproaring saga of Alaska, in 1958, the year Alaska became a State. There was less controversy over this novel than there had been over “Giant,” a sweeping novel about Texas which infuriated Texans, sold three million copies, and brought new film laurels to James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson.