Maurine Whipple (January 20, 1903 – April 12, 1992) was an American novelist and short story writer best known for her novel The Giant Joshua (1941).

[1] The book is lauded as one of the most important Mormon novels, vividly depicting pioneer and polygamous life in the 19th century.

After attending the 1937 Rocky Mountain Writer's conference, she made connections that led to her publish The Giant Joshua with Houghton Mifflin.

Afterwards, she made plans to make The Giant Joshua into a trilogy, but the two additional volumes, along with two other novels, remained unfinished at the time of her death.

Maurine stayed home from school to help raise George, who suffered from eczema and other ailments and needed constant care.

The novella featured a man who dreamed of building an oil well that would greatly profit his hometown of Beaver Dam.

[22] She taught in Virgin, Utah 1928–1929, alongside Nellie Gubler, and went to California that summer to study drama and recreational programs.

[23] In 1930, she taught in Heber City, where she organized a play to raise money for a physical education program against the principal's wishes.

Greenslet encouraged Whipple to apply for Houghton Mifflin's $1,000 literary fellowship for new writers working on their first novel.

[31] Whipple lived with her parents while she wrote the chapters for the fellowship application, often getting inspiration right before falling asleep and working through the night.

He constantly gave her advice, personally lent her money, and made it possible for her to stay at the artist colony Yaddo to finish her book.

[35] Joseph Walker, an ex-Mormon doctor from St. George living in Hollywood, read early manuscripts and wrote Whipple encouraging letters.

[36] Whipple was concerned that her work comparing unfavorably with Vardis Fisher's, but both Walker and Greenslet told her that her writing was better than his.

As a fellowship winner, the accompanying contract was not generous, and Whipple received advances on her royalty checks to finish the novel.

[40][41][3] It depicts the 1861 settling of St. George as part of Brigham Young's Dixie Mission with the physical, emotional, and mental difficulties of pioneer life and polygamy.

West in the Saturday Review of Literature wrote that the book, "is excellent reading and it catches a previously neglected side of the Mormon story—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.”[44] However, The Giant Joshua did not have as positive of a reception at home in Utah.

John A. Widtsoe wrote in The Improvement Era that its treatment of polygamy was unfair,[42] and the novel was "straining for the lurid," though he praised how it showed the "epic value" of Mormon settlements.

[48] In June 1942, she stayed in an apartment near historian Fawn M. Brodie in Hanover, New Hampshire, while she rewrote her concept for a Western romance novel, which she titled The Arizona Strip.

[50] In 1943, Whipple wrote a short story set in Salt Lake City in 1918 during the Spanish Flu epidemic.

[53] Literary critic Harry Hansen titled his review "Mormons are Peculiar: Maurine Whipple Whips Up More About Them and Their Country."

A review in The Salt Lake Tribune described Whipple as sympathetic yet objective, combining humor and logic.

A review in The Chicago Sun called the book a "sales promotion" and questioned whether or not Mormons should want to be completely American.

[55] Also in 1945, Whipple employed a new agent, Max Becker, who sold the still unwritten sequel to The Giant Joshua to Simon and Schuster.

[32] Ill health and psychological discomfort made it difficult for Whipple to settle into writing the entire book.

[61] In 1948, she spent much time and energy writing a piece on Harry Goulding for Bert MacBride to possibly publish in Reader's Digest.

"[63] Veda Hale, Whipple's biographer and friend, describes her personality as "paradoxical", being emotionally needy and idealistic yet distant from her family; writing voluminously, yet rarely publishing.

Whipple later fictionalized her meeting with Woodbury in "Confessions of a She Devil," imagining him as an "experienced seducer of young girls.

"[14] The experience reappears in another short story, showing, according to Hale, her "deep sexual vulnerability" which informed her writing in The Giant Joshua.

The Giant Joshua came to be regularly taught in the curriculum of Mormon literature courses at Brigham Young University.