From Show Boat to Giant on a Typewriter

What’s the connection between James Dean’s last movie Giant and Jerome Kern’s musical Show Boat?
Why, it’s Edna Ferber, of course.

Giant and Show Boat were both based on Ferber novels.
Other musical, theatrical and film productions based on her works include So Big, Stage Door, Dinner at Eight, Ice Palace, Saratoga Trunk and Cimarron (which won an Oscar).

Ferber, born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on August 15, 1885, was a novelist, short story writer and playwright. When he was 12, Ferber and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she later took newspaper jobs at the Appleton Daily Crescent and the Milwaukee Journal before publishing her first novel, Dawn O'Hara in 1911.

She covered the 1920 Republican and Democratic national conventions for the United Press Association.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1924 book So Big, which was made into a silent film starring Colleen Moore that same year. An early talkie movie remake followed, in 1932, starring Barbara Stanwyck (below) and George Brent, with Bette Davis in a supporting role.

A 1953 remake of So Big starred Jane Wyman.
Ferber died of stomach cancer at her home in New York City on April 16, 1968, aged 82.