American author Edna Ferber (1887-1968) wrote popular fiction and collaborated on several successful Broadway plays.

Born in Kalamazoo, Mich., Edna Ferber at an early age moved with her family to Appleton, Wis., where she spent most of her childhood. When her father lost his vision, she was forced to forsake her acting ambitions and, at the age of 17, began full-time work as a reporter for the Appleton Daily Crescent. Shortly afterward she joined the staff of the Milwaukee Journal and later the Chicago Tribune. During this period she wrote several short stories, some of which were published in Everybody's Magazine. She discarded a novel which her mother salvaged and had published in 1911 as Dawn O'Hara. Two short-story collections followed, Buttered Side Down (1912) and Roast Beef Medium (1913), and the novels Fanny Herself (1917), The Girls (1921), and Gigolo (1922).

Ferber won her first popular success with the novel So Big, the story...