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, butfiction. This statement is made in the hope that itwill forestall such protest as may be registered bydemon statisticians against certain liberties taken withcharacters, places, and events. In the Chicago portionof the book, for example, a character occasionallyappears some three or four years after the actual dateof his death. Now and then a restaurant or gamblingresort is described as running full blast at a time whenit had vanished at the frown of civic virtue. This,then, was done, not through negligence in research, butbecause, in the attempt to give a picture of the time,it was necessary slightly to condense a period of fifteenor twenty years.
E. F.
SHOW BOAT
I
Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenalalways said she was thankful it had been noworse. She knew whereof she spoke, for it wasliterally by a breath that she had escaped being calledMississippi.
“Imagine Mississippi Ravenal!” she often said, inlater years. “They’d have cut it to Missy, I suppose,or even Sippy, if you can bear to think of anything sohorrible. And then I’d have had to change my nameor give up the stage altogether. Because who’d go