Showing posts with label Algonquin Round Table. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Algonquin Round Table. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Women's History Month No. 14


First, here's a factoid for you: on this day in history, 1781 to be exact, the astronomer Wm. Herschel discovered Uranus. :-)

Secondly, please note the life & works of the lady who wrote this: "I am not belittling the brave pioneer men but the sunbonnet as well as the sombrero has helped to settle this glorious land of ours."
And this: "Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death - fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant."
Edna Ferber (1885 ~ 1968)

If you don't already know, you will, once you look her up, that Miss Ferber was a stagestruck journalist-turned-novelist/playwright who wrote many a novel that was made into a film: Cimarron. Giant. So Big, [winner of the 1925 Pulitzer Prize for fiction]. Show Boat, which was turned into a glorious & historic Broadway production before it became a 1951 Technicolor vehicle for Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, & Ava Gardner. Saratoga Trunk. I'm sure there are more. Anyway, Miss Ferber also occupied a regular seat at the Algonquin Round Table. AND, she wrote one of my all-time favorite books, Edna's memoir of a rich life, lived, mostly, in the first half of the 20th Century: A Peculiar Treasure. I'll tell you, too, that when I visited Eleanor Roosevelt's home [left, so I was told, as it had been when she left it to go off to heaven] years ago, there it was on her coffee table.