Show Boat

The novel that inspired the Broadway classic—a saga of romance, revenge, and a riverboat theater troupe: “First-rate storytelling . . . irresistible.” —The New York Times Book Review

Spanning four decades and three generations, and journeying from the post–Civil War South to Chicago to New York, Show Boat has been adapted for radio, stage, and screen, becoming a landmark of American culture.

The bestseller by Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber follows a cast of characters who live and work aboard a riverboat, traveling in order to perform for audiences along the banks of the Mississippi. It is a story of adventure, drama, destructive passions, racial conflict, and romantic entanglements, set amid the changing times of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.