A Jewish Giant of Letters, Revisited
The first Jewish novelist to receive a Pulitzer Prize is not a well-known name, today. But decades before a Jewish man received the honor, Edna Ferber won a Pulitzer for her 1924 novel, So Big. Among the most commercially successful Jewish writers during the 1920s–1940s, Ferber wrote books that were regularly made into Hollywood movies and Broadway plays. Through her own literary earnings,
Ferber lived fashionably in Manhattan, supporting her widowed mother and sister. Recently, author Julie Gilbert wrote Giant Love, Edna Ferber, Her Bestselling Novel of Texas, and the Making of a Classic American Film, a biography about her great-aunt.
More information about the impressive achievements of Ferber’s career in the opening chapters of Giant Love would have educated readers about the singularity of Ferber’s accomplishments. Like so many women of her generation, Ferber did not claim the title feminist; she lived it—and she wrote it into her female characters. This book focuses more narrowly on the path of Giant, Ferber’s successful 1952 novel-turned-movie while still providing a sense of the early transformation that Ferber made “from a dumpy, plucky child to a streamlined international- celebrity writer.”
But Gilbert also shows that the same power and energy Ferber exerted from behind the pen extended to her relationships. Gilbert grew up with her great aunt in her life—and she shares her memories judiciously in her engagingly written book. After Ferber switched from journalism to fiction, she committed to exposing problematic parts of society: “The novels I wrote were novels of protest,” Ferber later explained.
In exposing the injustice of extreme wealth juxtaposed with Texans’ mistreatment of the Mexican- Americans who worked for them, Giant ruffled the feathers of Texan readers who were not fans of the Jewish novelist from New York and her attempts to “weave in the race prejudice you northerners, especially Jews, are always raving about.” For her part, Ferber, who was sixty-two when Giant was published, had no regrets about her novel even as it met with Texan defensiveness; plenty of other readers were fans of the bestseller about a state in which many midcentury Americans had never set foot.
The New York Times reviewer called the novel, “a guided tour to an incredible land… Miss Ferber’s Texas is … the culmination of that biggest-and-bestest cult peculiar to this side of the Atlantic.” Ferber had already moved on to the research and writing of her next novel: Ice Palace, about Alaska. Texans were more celebratory of the 1956 film, Giant, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean.
Giant managed to communicate the feelings of injustice that, as Gilbert shows, had taken root in Ferber, during her own childhood experiences with antisemitism while her family resided in Ottumwa, Iowa. The Ferber family’s bad luck in the dry-goods business worsened when Edna’s father, Jacob, went blind and died young. Ferber soon became the primary financial supporter of her family.
But as Gilbert’s book demonstrates, despite Ferber’s often tough exterior—and likely because of it—she was an emotional supporter of friends of all ages, men and women. One of those close friends was the actress Katherine Hepburn, who met Ferber through their mutual theatrical friends. As Gilbert describes Ferber and Hepburn: “Both were intolerant of injustice, laziness, stupidity, and arrogance, speaking their minds with passionate eloquence. They lived their lives—public and private as they saw fit.” Hepburn told Gilbert that she viewed Ferber as a “unicorn woman”—a phrase that Gilbert puzzles out in intriguing ways, including ways relevant to Ferber’s romantic life. In the sense that Ferber was unique and exceptional, Giant Love shows that description is entirely fitting. Ferber was a giant in her time.
Rachel Gordan is the 2024–2025 NEH Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Jewish History in NYC, and the author of Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American.
