SOURCE: "Edna Ferber," in The Spyglass: Views and Reviews, 1924–1930, edited by John Tyree Fain, Vanderbilt University Press, 1963, pp. 70-4.

An American poet, literary critic, social commentator, and historian, Davidson is best known as a member of the Fugitive poets—a group of southern American writers that included John Crowe Ranson, Robert Penn Warren, and Alan Tate—and as a member of the Agrarians—a group that included many of the Fugitives and promoted the idea of agrarianism (as opposed to industrialism) in their writings on politics, social criticism, and economic theory. In the following review, originally published in the Nashville Tennessean on August 22, 1926, he praises the descriptive, panoramic elements of Show Boat, but concludes that the novel, like all of Ferber's work and, indeed, "most novels by women," lack depth.

Edna Ferber explained in So Big that cabbages are beautiful, and a multitude of readers, including the Pulitzer...