[In the following largely favorable review of Show Boat, the critic, lamenting his modern culture's lack of what he calls "local color," suggests that while Ferber's novel captures much of the feel of life on the Mississippi in the 1890s, it is perhaps too self-consciously nostalgic, "got up," to be fully satisfying.]

Who speaks a good word for the 'nineties now? What critic celebrated the exquisite low reliefs of Mary Wilkins Freeman's short stories when last year the American Academy awarded her its gold medal a decade (as usual) too late? Who spoke a fitting word at the death of James Lane Allen, recalling that pearl of Southern sentiment, "The Kentucky Cardinal—(the toes, were they really cut off!)?" Who forgets, but who speaks, of Colonel Carter of Cartersville and his rugged cuffs, or Amos Judd, or Monsieur Beaucaire, or the whimsical creoles of George Washington Cable, or Van Bibber, or Dr. Lavendar? Outmoded now the humors of sentimental hearts and alien to the city life of an America that finds "nize" babies and hotel women and night clubs more amusing than country life, which, according to present convention, is sordid, or the small town, which exists now only to be satirized. And yet, though lacking our sophisticated superiority, what a gift that generation had! They were not writers of scope and ruthless honesty. No American accepted in the 'nineties would have had the courage, under the maternal eye of Howells, to put in all about the murder (and the murderer, and his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts) as Dreiser is now applauded for doing. They were not disillusioned—life for them was full of queer corners where the saddest and most amusing things happened. They were never bored, and never bored their readers. Like the actors of that day, they were not ashamed of sure-fire appeals to the sentiment of their audiences. Tears, happy endings, mysterious great ones (a specialty of Robert Chambers), reversals, broken hearts and mended ones were common property, and even Miss Wilkins made her provincial New England grandiose in its tragedies, unlike Main Street of today, or that most undesirable house under the elms of O'Neill's New England. But what a sense for personality they had, what a feeling for character and neighborhood, how many people they created that one can still call by name!

Theirs was the art of local color, a minor art, in which the color often subdues the story to its own uses, yet an art especially congenial to a congeries of sections such as was, and to some extent still is, the United States. Was there ever a nation richer in materials for a picturesque literature in the day when a New Englander was a New Englander, a Southerner still unreconstructed, the West untamed, the South West still Spanish, the hill folk primitive, the Irish immigrant not yet pursy, the great rivers still alive with traffic, pioneering a fact, and such levellers as syndicates, moving pictures, The Saturday Evening Post, and chain stores not yet invented!

We shall regret the loss of all that color. We are already regretting it: the screen has begun to revive the old character parts and make romantic the individualism of the days before standardization; the novelists, wearying of analysis, are beginning to reconstruct.

Miss Edna Ferber's just published Show Boat is local color come to life again, and it is not merely because she takes for scene the Cotton Blossom river theatre floating down the Mississippi that her book is so rich in "characters" (Schultzy, Ravenal, Parthy, Captain Andy, Julie, Elly, Magnolia, the heroine herself), "characters" are at home in a local color story. There is not much plot, for the author is interested in life not in plot, there is just the river and the folk of its own that it breeds like a flora and fauna. Miss Ferber has less to go on than the writers of the 'nineties who had seen for themselves local color at its liveliest. One feels that she has "got up" the river and wide-open Chicago and even the marvelous New England school-marm Parthenia, who makes the theatre serve puritanism and thrift, got them all up with the high competence of her short stories of modern bourgeois life where nothing relevant is omitted and nothing irrelevant retained. But the getting up is good. When Kim, the granddaughter, so to speak, of the Show Boat emerges as a stage success of the modern, sophisticated variety in New York, the fabric of the story weakens and pales. The "frail and brittle" life of current New York does not lend itself to local color.

Not so the Mississippi. With the river, Miss Ferber's synthesis is a grand success. We have learned something about story telling (thanks to the high price of space) since the 'nineties, and Miss Ferber uses her experience. The narrative skips adroitly back and forward through three generations, plucking from roaring Chicago and brittle New York only what will best serve as background for the show boat where Elly and Julie perform, while Jo sings spirituals in the galley, Parthy glares over her corsets, Magnolia makes her debut and the river rushes by.

The local colorists of an earlier generation would enjoy, one guesses, Show Boat, while finding it (like New York) a little brittle, intellectual, "got up." They would be pleased with the "characters," quick to approve such drama as the discovery of Julie's Negro blood, or the comedy of Gaylord's "ef he loves yuh and you love him," and if they should say that it is only local color after all, why so were theirs, so is all local color unless it is something more.