SOURCE: "Showing America," in Saturday Review, New York, Vol. 111, No. 4, August 21, 1926, pp. 49, 54.

In the following largely favorable review of Show Boat, the critic, lamenting his modern culture's lack of what he calls "local color," suggests that while Ferber's novel captures much of the feel of life on the Mississippi in the 1890s, it is perhaps too self-consciously nostalgic, "got up," to be fully satisfying.

Who speaks a good word for the 'nineties now? What critic celebrated the exquisite low reliefs of Mary Wilkins Freeman's short stories when last year the American Academy awarded her its gold medal a decade (as usual) too late? Who spoke a fitting word at the death of James Lane Allen, recalling that pearl of Southern sentiment, "The Kentucky Cardinal—(the toes, were they really cut off!)?" Who forgets, but who speaks, of Colonel Carter of Cartersville and his rugged cuffs, or Amos Judd...