Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History »

J. E. SMYTH holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies and American Studies from Yale University. She teaches at the University of Warwick (UK) and is the author of Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From CIMARRON to CITIZEN KANE.

Edna Ferber's Hollywood reveals one of the most influential artistic relationships of the twentieth century--the four-decade partnership between historical novelist Edna Ferber and the Hollywood studios. Ferber was one of America's most controversial popular historians, a writer whose uniquely feminist, multiracial view of the national past deliberately clashed with traditional narratives of white masculine power. Hollywood paid premium sums to adapt her novels, creating some of the most memorable films of the studio era--among them Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant. Her historical fiction resonated with Hollywood's interest in prestigious historical filmmaking aimed principally, but not exclusively, at female audiences.

In Edna Ferber's Hollywood, J. E. Smyth explores the research, writing, marketing, reception, and production histories of Hollywood's Ferber franchise. Smyth tracks Ferber's working relationships with Samuel Goldwyn, Leland Hayward, George Stevens, and James Dean; her landmark contract negotiations with Warner Bros.; and the controversies surrounding Giant's critique of Jim-Crow Texas. But Edna Ferber's Hollywood is also the study of the historical vision of an American outsider--a woman, a Jew, a novelist with few literary pretensions, an unashamed middlebrow who challenged the prescribed boundaries among gender, race, history, and fiction. In a masterful film and literary history, Smyth explores how Ferber's work helped shape Hollywood's attitude toward the American past.

Foreword Thomas Schatz vii

Acknowledgments xiii

Chapter 1 Edna Ferber's America and the Fictions of History 3

Chapter 2 The Life of an Unknown Woman: So Big, 1923-1953 31

Chapter 3 Making Believe: Show Boat, Race, and Romance, 1925-1957 71

Chapter 4 Marking the Boundaries of Classical Hollywood's Rise and Fall: Cimarron, 1928-1961 113

Chapter 5 Writing for Hollywood: Come and Get It and Saratoga Trunk, 1933-1947 153

Chapter 6 Jim Crow, Jett Rink, and James Dean: Reconstructing Giant, 1952-1957 191

Chapter 7 The New Nationalism: Ice Palace, 1954-1960 229

Notes 267

Selected Bibliography 305

Index 325