The Ferbers had moved to Kalamazoo from Chicago, Illinois, in order to open a dry goods store, and her older sister Fannie was born there three years earlier.

[9] At the age of 12, Ferber and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she graduated from high school and later briefly attended Lawrence University.

After graduation, Ferber planned to study elocution, with vague thoughts of someday becoming an actress, but her family could not afford to send her to college.

[11][12] While Ferber was recovering, she began writing and selling short stories to various magazines, and in 1911 she published her first novel, Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed.

I was startled and grimly pleased when some of the reviewers said that obviously these stories had been written by a man who had taken a feminine nom de plume as a hoax.

Ferber initially believed her draft of what would become So Big lacked a plot, glorified failure, and had a subtle theme that could easily be overlooked.

It was not until Kern explained that he and Oscar Hammerstein II wanted to create a different type of musical that Ferber granted him the rights and it premiered on Broadway in 1927, and it has been revived eight times.

[a] In her early novel Dawn O'Hara, the title character's aunt remarks, "Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning – a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling."

Ferber collaborated with Round Table member George S. Kaufman on several plays presented on Broadway: Minick (1924), The Royal Family (1927), Dinner At Eight (1932), The Land Is Bright (1941), Stage Door (1936), and Bravo!

[20] In a poll carried out by the Saturday Review of Literature, asking American writers which presidential candidate they supported in the 1940 election, Ferber endorsed Franklin D.

[22] Ferber's works often concerned small subsets of American culture, and sometimes took place in exotic locations she had visited but was not intimately familiar with, such as Texas or Alaska.

[23] Ferber wrote thirteen novels, two autobiographies, numerous short stories, and nine plays, many which were written in collaborations with other playwrights.