GIANT LOVE

Edna Ferber was a household name in her time, if no longer.

Ferber was a popular novelist (Show Boat, 1926) who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (So Big, 1924); a collaborator with George S. Kaufman on classic plays (Dinner at Eight, Stage Door, and The Royal Family); and an insider at the famous literary Algonquin Round Table. She was also the great-aunt of author Gilbert, who brings personal insights into both a previous Ferber biography and this in-depth account of the writing of Ferber’s greatest novel, Giant (1952), and its transformation into a classic American film. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1885, Ferber experienced Midwestern antisemitism that fueled her lifelong contempt for all forms of prejudice. Giant, the story of three generations of a cattle-raising, oil-rich Texan family, “blatantly points to racial inequality” and the mistreatment of Mexican Americans in the Lone Star State. Gilbert methodically shows how Ferber’s “rapacious research,” her “digging in for regional authenticity,” helped her depict Texas “as virile as it was vast.” Readers will enjoy the book’s thorough analysis of the filming of director George Stevens’ masterful adaptation. Larger-than-life actors fleshed out this Western epic, among them Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, who met his tragic end before completion of the movie’s production. Months of shooting on location in Marfa, Texas, provide the book’s highlights: Hudson was initially a “dark horse” for his starring role, Taylor became a precursor of liberal feminism in hers, and Dean “performed like a gifted angel and behaved like a juvenile delinquent” on set. Gilbert describes plaudits and brickbats among reactions to both novel and film, but her focus is squarely on the idiosyncratic creative dynamo behind the Giant phenomenon.

The story behind the making of what became “the national movie of Texas.”