Author Julie Gilbert in Conversation with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch

On Wednesday, December 11th at 6:30pm, author Julie Gilbert will speak about her new book, Giant Love: Edna Ferber, her best-selling novel of Texas, and the making of a classic American film, with her legendary Knopf editor, Victoria Wilson, and the professor of film at Brooklyn College and author of sixteen books on film and theater, Foster Hirsch.

GIANT LOVE

A book that explores the great American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Ficton, whose work was made into many Academy Award-winning movies; the writing of her controversial, international best-selling novel about Texas, and the making of George Stevens' Academy Award winning epic film of the same name, Giant.

The stupendous publication of Edna Ferber's Giant in 1952 set off a storm of protest over the novel's portrayal of Texas manners, money and mores with oil-rich Texans threatening to shoot, lynch or ban Ferber from ever entering the state again.

In Giant Love, Julie Gilbert writes of the internationally best-selling Ferber, one of the most widely read writers in the first half of the 20th Century - her evolution from mid-west maverick girl-reporter to Pulitzer Prize winning, beloved American novelist, from her want-to-be actress days to becoming Broadway's acclaimed prize-winning playwright whose collaborators - George S. Kauffman and Moss Hart, among them, were, along with Ferber, herself, the most successful playwrights of their time.

Here is the making of an American classic novel and the film that followed in its wake. We see how George Stevens, Academy-Award winning director, wooed the prickly, stubborn Ferber, ultimately getting her to agree to everything including writing, for the first time ever, a draft of a screenplay, to her okaying James Dean for the part of the ranch hand, Jett Rink, something she was dead set against.

Here is the casting of Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean and their backstory triangle of sex and seduction - each becoming a huge star because of the film; the frustrated Stevens trying to direct the instinctive but undisciplined Dean, and the months long landmark filming in the sleepy town of Marfa, Texas, suddenly invaded by a battalion of a film crew and some of the biggest stars in the rising celebrity culture.

JULIE GILBERT was born in New York City and was educated at Boston University. She is the author of four books, among them a biography of her great aunt, Edna Ferber, Edna Ferber and Her Circle and Opposite Attraction: The Lives of Erich Maria Remarque and Paulette Goddard, Gilbert is a member of The Dramatists Guild, The Writers Guild of America, East, The Authors Guild, Actors’ Equity, and League of Professional Theater Women. She has taught Creative Writing at New York University’s School of Continuing Education and currently heads The Writers Academy at The Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach, Florida where she lives part time, as well as in New York City.

Victoria Wilson, as Vice President, Executive Editor at Alfred A. Knopf, worked with many writers, among them Anne Rice, whom she discovered, Lorrie Moore, Eve Babitz, Laurie Colwin, Jill Ciment, Sapphire, and Helen Simpson. After five decades helping to shape and build Knopf, Wilson published her biography, A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 ( Simon and Schuster) to great acclaim ( “Monumental . . . a vivid portrait of the entire era in which she flourished.” — Peter Bogdanovich). Wilson has served on the board of PEN, Poets & Writers, was Vice President of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, and was appointed by President Clinton to the US Commission on Civil Rights.

Foster Hirsch is the author of 16 books on subjects related to theatre and film. A native of California, Hirsch received his B.A. from Stanford University and holds M.F.A, M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. Hirsch joined the English department of Brooklyn College in 1967, and in 1973 became one of the first professors to join the school's newly established film department. He has also been associated with the Pine Bluff Film Festival since its inception in 1994.

Event Venue

Salmagundi Club, 47 5th Avenue, New York, United States