Autograph letter to the novelist and playwright Edna Ferber from Beulah Hunter, an actress who worked on the James Adams Floating Palace Theatre and who, with her husband Charles, welcomed Ferber to the boat when she was researching her novel Show Boat. Saginaw, Michigan; July 30, 1951. 3 pp. together with original envelope. Hunter thanks Ferber for her letter and writes that her husband Charles has died: "I feel the great loss of him keenly, for we were together many years, and very devoted to each other, it will be hard to readjust my life without him, I must go on." She offers her condolences on the death of Ferber's mother, and goes on to report: "It is strange the picture Show Boat opened here a few days after Charles' passing. I was interviewed and saw the preview. Of course I loved it. The cast is very good, but the cast in the stage production was better. Too bad you sold your rights, but we all make mistakes." A very interesting letter from the woman who was influential in the creation of Ferber's novel, later a beloved musical and film. Folding creases; envelope torn; overall fine. 5.25 x 7 inches (13.5 x 17.8 cm).

As she recalled in her autobiography, Edna Ferber got the initial idea for Show Boat in 1924 when Broadway producer Winthrop Ames jokingly suggested that on his next show "We won't bother with tryouts. We'll all charter a show boat and we'll just drift down the rivers, playing the towns as we come to them..." Ferber traveled to North Carolina to research the show boat tradition, still active in the South, and was welcomed aboard the James Adams Floating Palace Theater by "show folks" Charles Hunter and Beulah Adams Hunter. Ferber remembered the four days she stayed on the boat in rosy terms: "Those four days comprised the only show-boat experience I ever had. In those days I lived, played, worked, rehearsed, ate with the company. I sold tickets at the little box-office window, I watched the Carolina countryside straggle in, white and colored. I learned what Winthrop Ames had meant, and why, in that dreary hour after the New London performance of Minick, he had brought the show boat forth as a vague nostalgic memory." (A Peculiar Treasure: An Autobiography.)