Giant Love

Praise

“In this riveting narrative, Gilbert deftly balances first-person encounters with reportorial objectivity—the result is a multi-dimensional portrait of a writer’s creative process, accompanied by a vibrant history of the making of the film Giant.  While details of the film’s production are well-known, Gilbert, tuned in to her characters and her subject, endows them with new life. Nonetheless, the enigma of Ferber, an instinctive and unwavering feminist, forever alone and forever vigilant, hovers over the chronicle, and Edna herself is the star here, stealing the spotlight from all the others. Gilbert’s writing has the snap, the love of piling on adjectives in a flowing, unstoppable rhythm, the descriptive power and eye for riveting detail of a Ferber best-seller. Ferber could sweep the reader into the worlds she created in her meticulously researched novels; Julie Gilbert displays the same family gifts in her chronicle of the making of an American epic.”
—Foster Hirsch, author of Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties

“The magnificent Julie Gilbert proves that there is no better biographer of the life and work of her aunt Edna Ferber, than she. Giant Love is a study in the development of source material in Hollywood, including the importance of the translation of the voice from novel to script and a juicy behind the scenes look at how great movies are made. It’s all here, through Edna’s point of view, peppered with the personalities and talents of the time. In the author’s hands, the vibrant story comes to life, and it feels a lot like the first time I saw Giant on a big screen in a revival house. Mesmerizing!”
—Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of The Good Left Undone

“For much of the 20th century, Edna Ferber wrote novels in which resolute women gradually civilized lunk-headed men against the backdrop of changing times. Ferber’s earlier works, Show Boat and Cimarron, were just coming attractions for Giant. In Giant Love, Julie Gilbert writes the story of her grand-aunt’s novel, and especially of George Steven’s landmark movie adaptation, from the inside, with an intimate knowledge of family and the passion of a great narrative historian.”
—Scott Eyman, author of Charlie Chaplin vs. America

“A brilliant evocation of a remarkable woman and her achievements. One is left with the feeling—’Edna, thou shouldst be living (and writing) at this hour. We need you!’”
—Barry Day, editor of The Letters of Noel Coward and author of Coward on Film

“Giant Love is one of those rare books you can’t put down and don’t ever want to end. Well-researched, lucid, and beautifully written, it manages to take three stories—the life of the great Edna Ferber, the writing of the epic novel Giant, and the vivid and complex making of the film—and seamlessly blends them into one. Julie Gilbert has written a frank and beautiful tribute to the art of making art.”
—Andre Bishop, Producing Artistic Director of the Lincoln Center Theater

“Giant Love is a portrait of the indomitable artist—in this case, the pioneering spirit Edna Ferber—embracing the integrity of her vision in the face of intractable odds, including the male-dominated, subtlety-challenged world of Hollywood. Edna Ferber created ‘bingeworthy’ epics before sound pictures and television even existed and this marvelous book is an affectionate tribute to an un(der)sung American original.”
—Laurence Maslon, theater historian and host of the NPR radio program Broadway to Main Street
 
“At the end of this marvelous book, Julie Gilbert says of her great aunt Edna Ferber: ‘She was a serious . . . writer who happened to be female.’ Much the same can be said about Gilbert, who has taken us on a remarkable journey.  With access to what seems like every scrap of paper and correspondence ever created—where did she find it all?—Gilbert explains Ferber the person, Ferber the brave, Ferber the visionary, Ferber the stubborn, and overall, Ferber the major figure who must not be overlooked.  Pivoting around her controversial book Giant and its award-winning movie version, the story told here feels complete.  If only the politics of Giant were outdated; it feels all too relevant today. Reading the book made me go back and watch the film again—and made me see anew how revelatory Edna Ferber’s work still is.”
—Ted Chapin, author of Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies