Show Boat

On the Cotton Blossom, a floating theatre that travels the Mississippi, Magnolia Hawks, the daughter of the boat's kindly captain, Andy, and his stern wife, Parthy, grows up among actors and river people. She falls in love with the handsome gambler Gaylord Ravenal and follows him to Chicago, where his luck rises and falls, while her friend Julie, the boat's leading lady, is driven off the river when it is discovered that she has Black ancestry and is married to a white man, in a state where such marriages are forbidden.

Edna Ferber published the novel in 1926, and the next year it became the musical Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, with the song 'Ol' Man River', a landmark of American theatre. It entered the public domain in the United States in 2022. Read Ferber's So Big.