Edna Ferber: 47 books

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize "A masterpiece. . . . It has the completeness, [the] finality, that grips and exalts and convinces." — Literary Review Widely regarded as the master work of celebrated author and Algonquin Round Table mainstay Edna Ferber—who also penned other...

The basis for the Academy Award-winning major motion picture starring Best Actor nominee Richard Dix and Best Actress nominee Irene Dunne. This vivid and sweeping tale of the Oklahoma Land Rush, from Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber, traces the stunning challenges of settling an untamed frontier....

Edna Ferber’s classic paean of love to the Mississippi River and the showboats that ran up and down it is once again available in hardcover as a facsimile of the first edition. First published in 1926, this timeless tale of the Cotton Blossom, Cap’n Andy, his shrewd wife Parthy, and their beautiful...

The basis for the classic film starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman, Saratoga Trunk is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edna Ferber's enthralling saga of love, greed, and power set in New Orleans and Saratoga during the late nineteenth century. Saratoga Trunk unfolds the story of Clio Dulaine,...

Sometimes, it is what men miss that tells the real story. The classic short stories in this anthology are about women's lives and the things men don't see. The flight includes: A Jury of Her Peers, by Susan Glaspell A Pair of Silk Stockings, by Kate Chopin The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte...

Originally published in 1958, Ice Palace is Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber's classic and mighty novel about the taming of a great northern wilderness—Alaska. Czar Kennedy came to Alaska for money and power, Thor Storm for a dream. This is the story of their struggle, over a long half-century,...

Originally published in 1935, this is Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber's sprawling novel of Wisconsin's logging days, when fortunes—and families—were made and broken over king lumber. Barney Glasgow, who had fought his way up from chore-boy in the lumber camps of Iron Ridge to lumber king...

Edna Ferber, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Show Boat and Giant, achieved her first great success with a series of stories she published in American Magazine between 1911 and 1913. The stories featured Emma McChesney: smart, savvy, stylish, divorced mother, and Midwest traveling sales representative...

This intensely personal chronicle of a young girl growing up Jewish in a small midwestern town is the most autobiographical of Pulitzer Prize-winning Ferber’s novels, full of fine, full-blown, and fascinating characters.

Ferber's first big success as a writer came with the character Emma McChesney, a plucky, self-made businesswoman.  This volume, published in 1914, is the second in a trilogy that begins with Roast Beef, Medium (1913) and finishes with Emma McChesney and Co. (1915).  In this book, Emma's twenty-one-year-old son, Jock, comes to the fore. 

This 1912 collection of twelve short stories is notable for its refusal to provide happily-ever-after endings.  Instead, Ferber focuses on the everyday hardships and triumphs of her characters, mainly shopgirls, secretaries, and other working women.  Included are "The Frog and the Puddle," "The Man Who Came Back," and "The Homely Heroine."

Fanny Brandeis is a small-town midwestern Jewish girl determined to succeed as a businesswoman in the big city, while grappling to remain true to her roots. This semi-autobiographical 1917 novel was one of Ferber’s most celebrated books. It also showcases her trademark wry wit.

Roast Beef, Medium follows the adventures of Emma McChesney—a divorced, independent, traveling saleswoman for a skirt and petticoat company. The stories, originally published in American Magazine between 1911 and 1913, brought Ferber her first big success. She went on to publish two additional volumes of Emma’s adventures and adapt them into a Broadway play.

In Ferber's first novel, published in 1911, Dawn O'Hara is a New York newspaperwoman who returns home to Michigan when her mentally ill husband is institutionalized.  With the help of a handsome doctor, Dawn rebuilds her career as a journalist, but her growing feelings for the doctor are complicated by her loyalty to her husband.