Among the literary giants of early twentieth-century America whose works were adapted into Hollywood movies, few, if any, cut a larger figure than Edna Fer-ber. From her breakthrough success in 1924 with the best-selling Pulitzer Prize–winning novel So Big, which became a major motion picture that same year, to the pinnacle of her career with Giant three decades later, Ferber enjoyed a remarkable run of successful novels—and a few hit Broadway plays, including Dinner at Eight and Stage Door (co-written with George S. Kaufman), which in turn became hit movies. Ferber, in fact, was the top-selling woman writer of the twentieth century, and one clear measure of her impact on Hollywood was that just three of her best-selling novels—So Big, Show Boat, and Cimarron—generated eight movie adaptations from 1925 to 1960.

Although Ferber’s stature with the New York literati earned her a seat at the legendary Algonquin Round Table, literary critics and scholars have consistently undervalued or overlooked her work—due, no doubt, to its popular and commercial success, as well as to its obvious appeal to women. And perhaps not surprisingly, that critical neglect has extended into film studies. Despite the impact of her writing on the movie industry, and despite the scholarly interest in film adaptations of the work of such Ferber contemporaries as William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, film scholars, as JE Smyth points out,“have persistently ignored Edna Ferber.” Until now, that is. With Edna Ferber’s Hollywood, Smyth eradicates decades of inexplicable indifference toward what she aptly terms the “historic partner-