SHOW BOAT
BY
EDNA FERBER
AUTHOR OF
“SO BIG,” Etc.
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY EDNA FERBER.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN
THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY
LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
To
Winthrop Ames
Who First Said Show Boat
to Me
INTRODUCTION
“Show Boat” is neither history nor biography, but fiction. This statement is made in the hope that it will forestall such protest as may be registered by demon statisticians against certain liberties taken with characters, places, and events. In the Chicago portion of the book, for example, a character occasionally appears some three or four years after the actual date of his death. Now and then a restaurant or gambling resort is described as running full blast at a time when it had vanished at the frown of civic virtue. This, then, was done, not through negligence in research, but because, in the attempt to give a picture of the time, it was necessary slightly to condense a period of fifteen or twenty years.
E. F.
SHOW BOAT