埃德纳·菲伯

埃德娜·费伯（英语：Edna Ferber，1885年8月15日—1968年4月16日），美国作家，曾获1925年的普利策小说奖。

作品

由菲伯的小说《演艺船》改编的同名音乐剧被称为是第一部真正意义上的美国音乐剧。剧中的歌曲《老人河》也广为传唱。

长篇小说

Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed (1911) ISBN 9781406864816

Fanny Herself (1917) ISBN 9780809594221

The Girls (1921) ISBN 9781297417634

Gigolo (1922) ISBN 9781421841434

So Big (1924) ISBN 9780061859984

Show Boat (1926) ISBN 9780899682815

Cimarron (1929) ISBN 9780345805751

American Beauty (1931) ISBN 9780451006509

Come and Get It (1935) ISBN 9781879483057

Saratoga Trunk (1941) ISBN Saratoga Trunk

Great Son (1945) ISBN 9780449241158

Giant (1952) ISBN 9780449241233

Ice Palace (1958) ISBN 9780385047999

Edna Ferber (August 15, 1885 – April 16, 1968) was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical), Cimarron (1930; adapted into the 1931 film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture), Giant (1952; made into the 1956 film of the same name) and Ice Palace (1958), which also received a film adaptation in 1960. She helped adapt her short story "Old Man Minick", published in 1922, into a play (Minick) and it was thrice adapted to film, in 1925 as the silent film Welcome Home, in 1932 as The Expert, and in 1939 as No Place to Go.

Life and career

Early years

Ferber was born August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper, Jacob Charles Ferber, and his Milwaukee, Wisconsin–born wife, Julia (Neumann) Ferber, who was of German Jewish descent. The Ferbers had moved to Kalamazoo from Chicago, Illinois, in order to open a dry goods store, and her older sister Fannie had been born there three years earlier.

Ferber's father was not adept at business, and the family moved often during Ferber's childhood.

From Kalamazoo, they returned to Chicago for a year, and then moved to Ottumwa, Iowa, where they resided from 1890 to 1897 (ages 5 to 12 for Ferber).

In Ottumwa, Ferber and her family faced brutal anti-Semitism, including adult males verbally abusing, mocking and spitting on her on days when she brought lunch to her father, often mocking her in a Yiddish accent.

According to Ferber, her years in Ottumwa "must be held accountable for anything in me that is hostile toward the world".

During this time, Ferber's father began to lose his eyesight, necessitating costly and ultimately unsuccessful treatments. At the age of 12, Ferber and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she graduated from high school and later briefly attended Lawrence University.

Career

After graduation, Ferber planned to study elocution, with vague thoughts of someday becoming an actress, but her family could not afford to send her to college.

On the spur of the moment, she took a job as a cub reporter at the Appleton Daily Crescent and subsequently moved to the Milwaukee Journal. In early 1909, Ferber suffered a bout of anemia and returned to Appleton to recuperate. She never resumed her career as a reporter, although she subsequently covered the 1920 Republican National Convention and 1920 Democratic National Convention for the United Press Association, and newspaper work was a theme in her first novel, Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed, and the later Cimarron.

While Ferber was recovering, she began writing and selling short stories to various magazines, and in 1911 she published her first novel, Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed. In 1912, a collection of her short stories was published in a volume titled Buttered Side Down. In her autobiography, Ferber wrote:

In that day, and for a girl in her early twenties, they were rather hard tough stories... The book got good reviews. I was startled and grimly pleased when some of the reviewers said that obviously these stories had been written by a man who had taken a feminine nom de plume as a hoax. I have always thought that a writing style should be impossible of sex determination; I don't think the reader should be able to say whether a book has been written by a man or a woman.