The James Adams Floating Theatre

The boat on which Edna Ferber based her famous novel brought excitement and entertainment to isolated small towns up and down the East Coast in early twentieth-century America. The builder of the boat, James E. Adams, was a farmer from Michigan who taught himself to be a circus aerialist, started and prospered with his own carnival company, and, when retirement proved boring, decided to build a showboat. The book traces the history of the James Adams from its inception until its demise twenty-seven years later, a tale that includes fires, sinkings, a shooting, arrests, and several deaths.