Edna Ferber - August 15, 1885

Everyone thinks of her as a novelist, which of course she was, but she was also a playwright, collaborating with George F. Kaufman on things like Dinner at Eight and the aforementioned Stage Door. But she was for me first and foremost a novelist. Of her books, I've read "Giant," "So Big," and "Cimarron." I also have a personal connection to her, because when she came to Oklahoma in the 1920s to research "Cimarron," she rented a room from my mother's aunt who lived in Pawnee at the time. I didn't learn that until I was in graduate school from the daughter of that aunt, but it was a treat to know that my relatives probably gave Ferber some info about the history of the state she was going to write about in the time before it was a state, at and after the opening of the Cherokee Strip land run.