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).Maureen Whipple, Mormon Literature Database (accessed March 17, 2012) The book is lauded as one of the most important Mormon novels, vividly depicting pioneer and polygamous life in the 19th century.
Whipple grew up in St. George, Utah. She attended Dixie College, then graduated from the University of Utah with honors. She taught high school for several years in both Utah and Idaho. 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. Although she never published any additional longer works, she published essays, short stories, and articles in various journals and periodicals.
Early life and education Maurine Whipple was born to Charles and Annie Lenzi (McAllister) Whipple on January 20, 1903, in St. George, Utah, the oldest of six children. Her parents were both children of parents in polygamous relationships. Charlie left the church during Whipple's childhood. Whipple's maternal grandmother, Cornelia Lenzi McAllister, and her fellow sister wives told Whipple stories about their lives when she was young. When she was twelve years old in 1915, Maurine's mother gave birth to her brother George and had a nervous breakdown. Maurine stayed home from school to help raise George, who suffered from eczema and other ailments and needed constant care.
In 1906, alongside his lumber yard and ice house businesses, Charlie and some business associates ran a movie theater in town. When she was old enough, Whipple worked in the theater as a janitor and popcorn girl until it closed in the Great Depression. Historian Juanita Brooks, who taught at Maurine's school when she was a senior, described her as precocious and recalled that she was the editor of the school newspaper and yearbook. As a teenager, she taught Sunday School in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). She considered herself an active member until the 1930s.
Whipple began her higher education at Dixie College and then transferred to the University of Utah in 1923. She stayed with family during her sophomore and junior years. Whipple boarded at the Beehive House during her senior year. She wrote short stories for her English classes and completed her student teaching, probably at Stewart Junior High. She graduated in 1926 with honors.
Teaching After graduating, Whipple taught at four different schools throughout Utah and Idaho. She often disagreed with principals over the best way to educate children. She taught first in Monroe, Utah, where she had trouble disciplining a class of boys. She was not hired for the next school year, and the principal refused to write her a letter of recommendation. She taught in Georgetown, Idaho, 1926–1927, and wrote the novella "Beaver Dam Wash" while recovering from an appendectomy. The novella featured a man who dreamed of building an oil well that would greatly profit his hometown of Beaver Dam. She was not offered a contract for the next year, and worked the following year as an aid at Dixie High School. During that summer, she staged plays in her father's theater. She taught in Virgin, Utah 1928–1929, alongside Nellie Gubler, and went to California that summer to study drama and recreational programs. 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.
In 1931, she returned to the University of Utah to take a few classes and worked in the Neighborhood House, a government-sponsored project to bring recreation to a poor neighborhood. At the beginning of 1932, she taught dance in Boulder City, Nevada. She taught for six weeks in Latuda, Utah (a town near Price), In 1937, she wanted to be part of the Cedar City Easter pageant, in hopes that it would help her get a job at the new Cedar City Branch Agricultural College. She pursued a relationship with the pageant's director, Grant Redford, but he refused her advances and also her offer to help with the pageant, which Whipple found devastating. She became severely depressed and suicidal. McQuarrie became estranged from her husband, and Whipple stayed with her while she gave birth. McQuarrie made Whipple promise to go to the Rocky Mountain Writer's Conference in Colorado.
The Giant Joshua Whipple did go to the 1937 Rocky Mountain Writer's Conference and submitted "Beaver Dam Wash". She wrote the fictionalized autobiography "Confessions of a She Devil" at the conference. At the conference, Ford Madox Ford liked "Beaver Dam Wash" and convinced Ferris Greenslet, then vice president at Houghton Mifflin, to read it. Greenslet advised Whipple to make the novella a little longer; instead, Whipple proposed a Mormon epic and sent a sample chapter. Greenslet encouraged Whipple to apply for Houghton Mifflin's $1,000 literary fellowship for new writers working on their first novel. 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. Greenslet helped her to apply for the fellowship, and she won the 1938 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. She went to Boston to accept the prize. Greenslet greatly encouraged Whipple while she wrote The Giant Joshua over the next three years. 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. Although Whipple disliked Yaddo, complaining that she felt lonely and isolated, she completed much writing there. Joseph Walker, an ex-Mormon doctor from St. George living in Hollywood, read early manuscripts and wrote Whipple encouraging letters. 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. She wrote the manuscript in longhand and had others type it up for her.
After its publication, The Giant Joshua was not very profitable to Whipple. As a fellowship winner, the accompanying contract was not generous, and Whipple received advances on her royalty checks to finish the novel. Whipple also hired a literary agent, Maxim Liber, just after the publication of The Giant Joshua, and Liber took a percentage of money due to her. She fired him that August. The Giant Joshua sold well. It was fifth in a list of ten in Harper's Poll of the Critics and was second in The Denver Post's list of bestsellers.
The Giant Joshua is widely considered the greatest Mormon novel. 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. The book presents plural marriage as a test of faith similar to colonizing Utah's desert. Historian Juanita Brooks helped Whipple with historical details in The Giant Joshua, though Brooks was disappointed at the historical inaccuracies Whipple kept in the novel. More recent critics describe the novel as "firmly grounded in [its] historical milieu". Whipple was inspired by her own family history and family stories from the Beckstrom family and Annie Atkin, who grew up in St. George and later married Vasco Tanner. The novel was well-received outside of Utah, and inspired fans who sent Whipple letters expressing their love for her epic novel. Ray B. 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.” 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, and the novel was "straining for the lurid," though he praised how it showed the "epic value" of Mormon settlements. Whipple's own father called the novel vulgar.
In 1983, Whipple sold the movie rights to the book, which provided for her in her old age. In 1989, The Giant Joshua was the most-borrowed book in the Salt Lake City Public Library. In "Fifty Important Mormon Books", Curt Bench reported that Mormon scholars in 1990 unanimously chose The Giant Joshua as the best Mormon novel before 1980. In People of Paradox, Terryl Givens wrote that, "No one has succeeded better than Whipple at capturing the recurrent Mormon paradox: the independence and loneliness of an exiled people . . . making it perhaps the fullest cultural expression of the Mormon experience".
After The Giant Joshua Whipple traveled to the east coast to promote her book in January 1941. Whipple generously gave eight hundred dollars to her younger sister, whose husband was newly disabled. She also gave money to her mother Annie. By spring in 1941, due to her generosity and lack of financial management, she did not have very much money. Later Whipple stated, "I've had to send brothers through school, keep my brother-in-law in the hospital, help clothe their kids, help build their house, buy medicines for my mother, etc. Not that I'm complaining ... to me a family is important - more important than I'll ever be."
Later work
In 1942, Whipple wrote an article on the LDS Church for Look that portrayed the LDS Church favorably, called "Meet the Mormons". 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. The book was never finished. She gave guest lectures in cities on the west coast and midwest starting in the 1940s, with lectures supporting the war effort, until the mid 1970s. In 1943, Whipple wrote a short story set in Salt Lake City in 1918 during the Spanish Flu epidemic. A dying young wife is healed by a priesthood blessing from her husband. The story, "A Grain of Mustard," is considered one of Whipple's most positive depictions of the LDS Church.
In 1945, Whipple published a travel guide for tourists called This is the Place: Utah. In the guide, she criticized the LDS Church's use of tithing to build an expensive office building, among other things. In his review in the Saturday Review of Literature, Dale Morgan praised her skepticism and interest in people, but criticized her unattributed use of information from Utah Guide. Literary critic Harry Hansen titled his review "Mormons are Peculiar: Maurine Whipple Whips Up More About Them and Their Country." A reviewer in the Boston Herald said the book was unexpectedly entertaining. 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. Whipple's friends praised the book to her and Elvitta Phillips, regional editor of the Spokane Daily Column told her that the book had sold out in Spokane.