Released Nov. 24, 1956, the movie Giant was a blockbuster hit. It earned $35 million in ticket sales during its original studio release as well as $12 million in rentals in the United States and Canada alone. It won several Academy Awards including best motion picture, best director, and best actor. James Dean, the star, who died at age 24 in a car crash before the filming was completed, won the best actor award posthumously.

Considered a masterpiece of American film, Giant was directed by George Stevens, from a screenplay adapted from the 1952 bestselling novel of the same name, written by Edna Ferber. Yet Ferber’s name did not appear in the film’s credits. Nor did her name show up above the film’s title. In 1957, as Ingrid Bergman in Paris and Jerry Lewis in Hollywood announced the Academy Awards for the film, Ferber watched the ceremony on a small Magnavox television in a back room in her apartment. 

Ferber, however, won literary acclaim when few women succeeded as writers. In her new book, Giant Love: Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas and the Making of a Classic American Film, biographer (and Ferber’s great niece) Julie Gilbert describes how she did that. 

Ferber is mostly forgotten today, while many of her contemporaries, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, are still admired. Yet she wrote 12 novels including Cimarron, Show Boat, and Giant, as well as the Pulitzer Prize winner So Big. Ferber also composed eight plays, 11 collections of stories, and two memoirs.

Ferber was born to hardworking Jewish immigrants. When she was a child, her parents owned a dry goods store in Kalamazoo, Michigan. They tried to assimilate but didn’t succeed, and they moved frequently. Their moves showed them that residents of wholesome small towns in the Midwest could be just as antisemitic as those from big cities like Chicago. 

Hoping to become an actress but unable to afford acting classes, Ferber worked as a newspaper reporter after high school and learned to write succinctly and to highlight the telling detail. One of the pleasures of Giant Love is the way Gilbert includes lively excerpts from Ferber’s speeches, stories, letters, and research notes, such as in this one about Texas:

“The houses [in Nopal] were like whitened bones in the desert, gray-white, bleached, and pitted by the wind … the weeds choked the bedraggled flowers, flies droned at the doors.” One can almost hear Ferber’s iambic rhythm and see the poetic images.  

Later, Ferber was drawn to Texas. But deciding that the place was too wild for a woman to portray, she left. “This is a novel for a man to write,” she said, “a man who is a combination of Hemingway and Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis.” But she changed her mind and began researching Giant. Ferber leaned heavily on research, which, Gilbert suggests, animates Ferber’s best work.

Ferber also had pluck and mettle. When a gossip columnist wrote that Ferber had told director George Stevens that his was “the story I wanted to write,” implying that his work surpassed hers, she threatened legal action. “I wrote the novel,” she said. “I wrote it as I wanted to write it…It was not written with a motion picture sale in mind.”

Some of the territory covered in this book has been discussed in Don Graham’s popular 2018 history, Giant, which can make Gilbert’s new work repetitive for Ferber fans. But Gilbert alone can offer a family perspective that includes her personal memories of her great aunt. Gilbert’s memories of her great-aunt go back 68 years to when she first visited Ferber. Gilbert cannot remember seeing Ferber. What she recalls is her “lovely, velvety voice in my head saying, ‘Mother, don’t let her go too far.’” She also remembers Ferber’s mansion, Treasure Hill, in Easton, Connecticut, where hundreds of butterflies hovered above the green grass. Nearby was an enormous swimming pool surrounded by numerous trees — Ferber loved trees and had them planted in any available space. 

Treasure Hill was Ferber’s Reata, Gilbert writes, referring to the ranch in the novel Giant. Owned by the character Bick Benedict, the ranch was a refuge against Mexican immigrants. There was a 25-year conflict between the cattle-raising, wealthy Benedict family and the Mexican interlopers. As is the case with other Ferber stories, the conflicts in Giant are partly inspired by Ferber’s disdain for racism and corruption.

Gilbert writes engagingly about Ferber’s life during the filming of the movie adaptation of her novel — shot in California, Maryland, Virginia, and Marfa, Texas, which one actor called the ugliest town in America. It was noted for its restaurants bearing signs announcing that Mexicans, Negroes, and dogs were not welcome. Ferber said Texas served the worst food in the U.S. — “tough beef and fried everything.” 

The movie skyrocketed the profiles of its stars, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, according to Gilbert, who adds spicy tidbits of information: During the filming, Ferber, who never married and once called herself a Jewish nun, seemed attracted to Dean and spent time with him learning how to lasso cattle. 

Gilbert’s warm and brightly written literary biography plumbs the relationship between a writer and her work, showing how she became a celebrated author by sheer talent and drive.  

Diane Scharper teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins University Osher program. She is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.