Show Boat is a 1926 novel by American author and dramatist Edna Ferber. It chronicles the lives of three generations of performers on the Cotton Blossom , a floating theater on a steamboat that travels between small towns along the banks of the Mississippi River, from the 1880s to the 1920s. The story moves from the Reconstruction Era riverboat to Gilded Age Chicago to Roaring Twenties New York and finally returns to the Mississippi River. Show Boat was adapted as a Broadway musical in 1927 by Jerome Kern and Oscar ...
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Show Boat is a 1926 novel by American author and dramatist Edna Ferber. It chronicles the lives of three generations of performers on the Cotton Blossom , a floating theater on a steamboat that travels between small towns along the banks of the Mississippi River, from the 1880s to the 1920s. The story moves from the Reconstruction Era riverboat to Gilded Age Chicago to Roaring Twenties New York and finally returns to the Mississippi River. Show Boat was adapted as a Broadway musical in 1927 by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Three films followed: a 1929 version that depended partly on the musical, and two full adaptations of the musical in 1936 and 1951.
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Parthy Ann Hawkes should be one of the most beloved characters in all of American literature -- alongside Jay Gatsby, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Atticus Finch. She is at once a sartorial Presbyterian wife and mother and a school marm caricature, but that is okay, because she was a school marm and Ferber does not fail to make her eternally endearing as she constantly nags her husband and her daughter. I will return to this book again and again. Ferber successfully creates a setting and mood that feels genuine and plucked right out of history, although it may be slightly romanticized, as a theater troupe sails up and down the Mississippi bringing the best of bad American theater to the American people of the soil.
It reminded me on occasion of Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie," but only because the second half of the book is set in Chicago and it involves a couple's financial struggles: one a gambler, the other an actor. The similarities, pretty much, end there.
It's too bad that the musical version has become more popular, even though it has given American some wonderful music. Two things I wish had been included in the book: 1) more about Jo and Queenie (they disappear halfway through the story), 2) I wish Ferber had actually spent time on Parthy's arrival in Chicago to witness her daughter's situation (she skipped over it and returned to it briefly in one or two paragraphs). Other than that, I throughly enjoyed this book and will certainly return to it again in future.