Item Detail
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29709
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3
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0
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English
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Maurine Whipple's Story of the Giant Joshua
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Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought
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Winter 1971
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6
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3/4
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Salt Lake City, UT
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Dialogue Foundation
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55-62
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When Ernest Hemingway's FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS was on the national
best-seller lists in 1941, so was Maurine Whipple's TH E GIANT JOSHUA, a
637-page novel about the settling of the Utah Dixie Mission in the 1860s. The
novel, which won the Houghton-Mifflin prize in creative writing, received mixed
reviews, but essentially was well received, except in Utah. In a cover story in
the SATURDAY REVIEW for January 4, 1941, Ray B. West, Jr. said, "The book
as a whole . . . makes excellent readings, and it catches one side of the Mormon
story neglected in Vardis Fisher's 'Children of God' . . . , and that is the
tenderness and sympathy which existed among a people dogged by persecution
and hardships, forced to battle an inclement nature for every morsel of food
they ate, and to struggle for every moment of genuine happiness. In this
interview-story, Ms. Whipple recounts some of her experiences before, during
and after the writing of TH E GIANT JOSHUA.