GIANT LOVE:
Edna Ferber, Her Best-Selling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film
Julie Gilbert
Pantheon
400 pages
Julie Gilbert’s previous book was an overall Edna Ferber biography, but this one takes a deeper look into her great aunt’s literary career and creative process. It starts out with a shorter bio of Ferber, and her early career (including winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 1925 novel So Big). This is necessary groundwork for focusing on how she came to write what is still the most quintessentially (warts and all) Texan novel this side of Larry McMurtry.
Writers especially will appreciate how Ferber actively resisted writing Giant for years, yet could never quite break free of the idea. Fascinated and repulsed in nearly equal measure on an earlier visit, she was also quite daunted by the sheer size and complexity of the state and of the vast research it would take for her to accurately tell a story set there.
Almost reluctantly, in 1940 she traveled back to Texas alone to commence nearly thirteen years of research consisting of many books, articles, interviews with ranchers and oilmen and people from many different social strata, and visits—not just to West Texas, but Houston, Galveston, Dallas, San Antonio, and many other towns along the way. She again found herself exasperated and overwhelmed:
Goodbye, Texas. Goodbye forever. Some tougher sturdier writer will have to undertake the feat of bulldozing you. Little (as they used to say in the old-time novels) little did I dream that, in the next twelve years, Texas was to have a staggering effect on my life—my health, finances, emotions, work; or that weeks—months—of my time would be spent in Texas.
And in another entry:
Years passed. I wrote an autobiography, three or four novels, two plays. I could not put Texas out of my mind. Improbable events, incredible people, fantastic incidents boiled up out of Texas. …The inner urge to try to pin down on paper this incredible form of civilization called Texas became irresistible.
She finally began researching and writing Giant in earnest, remarking “Finally I wrote it to be rid of it.” What follows is a fascinating glimpse into the creation of the book and then the iconic movie. She also served as an uncredited co-writer of the screenplay, even struck up an unlikely (and tragically brief) friendship with James Dean, and ultimately came to regard Giant as her most difficult but most rewarding book in many ways.
–L.J. Gouveia
(See a companion review of Giant in Backlist Treasures)