Show Boat

By Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber’s tribute to the Mississippi River and the show boats that ran up and down it. This timeless tale of the “Cotton Blossom”, Cap'n Andy, his shrewd wife Parthy, their beautiful daughter Magnolia, and her remarkable daughter Kim as the story moves from the Reconstruction Era riverboat to Gilded Age Chicago to Roaring Twenties New York, and finally returns to the Mississippi River.

It was made famous on Broadway in 1927, when the legendary Jerome S. Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II collaborated on the musical. Since then Show Boat has become a beloved favorite, revived repeatedly to entertain generations through musical and movie renditions with haunting and lyrical songs such as “Old Man River” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine”.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667623238

Edna Ferber

Edna Ferber (1885-1968) was an American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Jewish parents, Ferber was raised in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin. Economic hardship and antisemitism made their family a tight knit one as they moved constantly throughout Edna’s youth. At 17, she gave up her dream of studying to be an actor to support her family, finding work at the Appleton Daily Crescent and the Milwaukee Journal as a reporter. In 1911, while recovering from anemia, Ferber published her debut novel, Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed, earning a reputation as a rising star in American literature. In 1925, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel So Big, which follows a young woman from a suburb of Chicago who takes a job as a teacher in a rural town. She followed up her critically acclaimed bestseller with the novel Show Boat (1926), which was adapted into a popular musical by Oscar Hammerstein and P. G. Wodehouse the year after its release. Several of her books became successful film and theater productions—So Big served as source material for a 1932 movie starring Barbara Stanwick, George Brent, and Bette Davis, which was remade in 1953 with Jane Wyman in the lead role. Ferber spent most of her life in New York City, where she became a member of the influential Algonquin Round Table group. In the leadup to the Second World War, Ferber supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt and was a fierce critic of Hitler and antisemitism around the world.

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