Edna Ferber was born Aug. 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Mich., to Jacob Charles Ferber, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and storekeeper, and Julia Neumann Ferber, a native of Milwaukee. Her father's poor health necessitated a number of moves while he was alive, but the family  settled for a time in Appleton, Wis., when Ferber was 12. Ferber attended Ryan High School in Appleton, where her writing talent began to blossom. She wrote for the school paper, the Ryan Clarion, and she produced a senior essay that caught the attention of the editor of the Appleton Daily Crescent, who offered her a job as a reporter. Employed at 17, she earned a salary of $3 per week -- a commendable sum at the turn of the 20th century. Ferber went on to write for the Milwaukee Journal and other papers, all the while honing her writing skills and gaining valuable experience. Ferber's experiences in Appleton and in Milwaukee colored some of her early writings. Two stories, "The Homely Heroine" and "A Bush League Hero," use Appleton as a backdrop. One of her early novels (published in 1911), Dawn O'Hara, tells the story of a newspaperwoman in Milwaukee. Ferber rose to national prominence with her series of tales featuring Emma McChesney, an assertive underskirt saleswoman.  The nature of Ferber's fictional characters led early reviewers to assume that a man had written the stories under a female pseudonym. Ferber reveled in this erroneous charge because she always believed that a writer's sex had no place in literary criticism. She worked hard at her craft and was quick to point out that writing was not for the carefree. She came into her own as a novelist in the 1920s, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for So Big, the story of a woman struggling to raise a child on a truck farm near Chicago. Other well-known books include Showboat (1926), Cimarron (1929), Giant (1952) and Ice Palace (1958). Showboat eventually became a hit musical comedy on Broadway -- Show Boat -- and Giant was turned into a big-screen movie of the same name that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson.  Ferber collaborated with George S. Kaufman to produce a number of successful plays, including Minick (1924), The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932), Stage Door (1936) and Show Boat (1937). Her two biographies, A Peculiar Treasure and A Kind of Magic, were published in 1939 and 1963, respectively. Ferber never married and had no regrets about it. "Being an old maid is like death by drowning -- a really delightful sensation after you have ceased struggling," she said.  Edna Ferber died April 16, 1968, in New York City, following a struggle with cancer. In an obituary, The New York Times said, "She was among the best-read novelists in the nation, and critics of the 1920s and 1930s did not hesitate to call her the greatest American woman novelist of her day."