Show Boat is a 1926 novel by American author and dramatist Edna Ferber. It chronicles the lives of three generations of performers on the Cotton Blossom, a floating theater that travels between small towns on the banks of the Mississippi, from the 1880s to the 1920s. The story moves from the Reconstruction-Era river boat to Gilded-Age Chicago to Roaring-Twenties New York, and finally returns to the Mississippi River. Show Boat was adapted as a Broadway musical in 1927 by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Three films followed: a 1929 version that depended partly on the musical, and two full adaptations of the musical in 1936 and 1951.