Edna Ferber was one of the most popular Jewish-American women writers in history. She was a best-selling author as well as a critically successful one and the first Jewish-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for the novel. Not only was she widely read in the United States, but her fiction was also translated into several foreign languages and distributed worldwide. In the course of her career, which spanned more than a half-century, Ferber produced more than twenty volumes of fiction and collaborated on eight plays, most of them written with George S. Kaufman. Additionally, many of Ferber's works, including Giant,Show Boat,Cimarron, and Ice Palace, have been made into successful Hollywood movies. Her writing was highly acclaimed by such notables as Rudyard Kipling and James M. Barrie, and Columbia University awarded her the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters in 1931 in recognition of her literary excellence...