Edna Ferber Wrote Vividly Of Life In America

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31704, 13 June 1968, Page 2

Edna Ferber Wrote Vividly Of Life In America

Edna Ferber, who died in New York recently at 82, may not have been a great writer but her vividly human stories had the robust, lasting qualities of honesty, richness of atmosphere and social vigour.

One of her novels, “So Big,” won a Pulitzer prize and became required reading in schools and universities. For four decades she wrote about the United States and its people with warmth and enthusiasm. Her style was simple, natural, and dramatic. As a writer, Miss Ferber had a keen eye for a story, a facile use of words and the ability to make characters and events real to readers. She attributed much of this to her early training as a newspaper reporter. Born in the midwestern city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, on August 15, 1885, to a Hun-garian-born shopkeeper and his American wife, she spent most of her youth in Appleton, Wisconsin. The family was unable to send her to college so, after completing secondary school, she went to work as a reporter on a local newspaper for $3 a week. Later she transferred to the big-city “Milwaukee Journal” at five times that salary. Met People She always remembered her newspaper career with fondness, maintaining that it developed in her a “vast storehouse of practical and psychological knowledge” that proved invaluable in her creative writing. It was then that she became acquainted with the mill workers, farmers, mechanics and railroadcrossing guards who later peopled her novels. During her years as a reporter in Milwaukee she drove herself relentlessly, developed anaemia and was sent home to Appleton to recuperate. Refusing to be inactive, she bought a second-hand typewriter that “kept grinning up at me with time-stained teeth,” as she later recalled, and wrote her first novel, “Dawn O’Hara,” the story of a newspaperwoman In Milwaukee. (It was published two years later.)

“Emma McChesney”

Then she wrote a shortstory about a fat, homely girl with “the soul of a willow wand,” sent it to a magazine and a few days later learned of its acceptance. She never returned to journalism. Miss Ferber first achieved

nationwide fame with her stories about Emma McChesney, a traveling saleswoman who sold underskirts. These stories were so popular that magazines vied with one another Tor the next McChesney adventure. In all, Miss Ferber wrote 30 of them before refusing to do more. Among the earliest of her 12 novels was “So Big,” the story of a farm woman and her sacrifice for her son. It sold more than 300,000 copies on publication in 1924, won a Pulitzer Prize, was translated into more than half a dozen languages and was twice made into a film over the years. Other Region* Miss Ferber’s early work dealt with the Midwest in which she had grown up, but she went on to explore other regions of the country that she found unique and endlessly fascinating. Many of the ideas for these novels came from snatches of conversation that aroused her interest

She was living in New York City by then, a part of the sparkling literary scene that included such witty observers as Anita Loos, Alexander Woollcott, the editor of the “New Yorker,” Harold Ross, and the playwrights Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. She and Mr Kaufman had joined forces to write a play called “Minick,” then being tried out in a town outside New York. No-one was very happy about it and the playwrights, actors and technicians were sitting glumly in producer Winthrop Ames’s hotel suite. “Never mind, boys and girls,” said Mr Ames. “Next time we won’t bother with tryouts. We’ll all charter a show boat and we’ll just drift down the rivers, playing the towns as we come to them."

“Show Boat”

Miss Ferber asked what a show boat was. When Mr Ames explained that it was a floating theatre, and that such boats used to ply the Mississippi and other rivers, giving performances In every port, the novelist sat up attentively. Here was news of a dramatic and romantic America of which she had not been aware.

She went South to do research on show boats, and the resulting novel, “Show Boat,” was published in 1926. Oscar Kammerstein II and Jerome Kern transformed the story into a musical comedy

that became one of the alltime hits of the American theatre. Wide Range When William Allen White told Miss Ferber about his visit to the State of Oklahome, where he had seen Indians in expensive automobiles driving over land that half a century earlier had been buffalo mudwallow, she immediately went there and began “Cimarron,” a portrayal of the 1889 land rush in Oklahoma and the region's later development Her ability to project herself Into any environment

was also reflected in such novels as “American Beauty,” about Polish immigrants in Connecticut; “Come and Get it,” set against the Wisconsin logging industry; “Saratoga Trunk,” which interwove an adventuress, a cowboy gambler, railroad land-grab-bers and a fashionable eastern spa in the 1880 s; “Great Son," a tale of four generations of a Seattle family: and “Giant,” a profile of Texas that angered many citizens of that state. Most of her novels were made into successful films.

She also wrote seven volumes of short stories and two autobiographical works: "A Peculiar Treasure” and, in 1963, “A Kind of Magic.” After her first disappointing experience at playwriting she went on to co-author a number of Broadway plays with George S. Kaufman, among them “The Royal Family,” ‘•Dinner at Eight,” and “Stage Door.” Wrote Daily A small, gracious woman, she had a spirit and tenacity that belied her elegance. For years she wrote more than 1000 words a day, 350 days a year, allowing nothing to distract her from each day’s allotted task. Edna Ferber once said: “Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until deathfascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant . . .” These words may well serve as an epitaph to a woman who lives on in her tales of America and its people.—U.S. Information (Service.