As if to defy her adult height of 5-foot-1, the writer Edna Ferber lived large, traveled widely and typed long and often.

Her dozen-odd novels were Dagwood sandwiches of intergenerational drama, hotly seasoned with social commentary. “So Big,” about a female farmer and her son in a Dutch community outside Chicago, sauntered off with the Pulitzer Prize in 1925. “Show Boat,” set along the Mississippi River, inspired an oft-revived musical and three movies.

And then there was her penultimate epic, in some ways her ultimate, published in 1952: “Giant,” about a Texas cattle rancher’s evolution throughout his long marriage to a more progressive Easterner, and much else besides.

Its depiction of discrimination against Mexicans and the mores of the nouveau riche made many Texans very, very angry. (A woman who read an excerpt in Ladies’ Home Journal detected Ferber “trying to weave in the race prejudice you Northerners, especially Jews, are always raving about,” and declined to buy the book.) In one of her memoirs, “A Kind of Magic,” Ferber likened the general response to being publicly hanged and dropped through a sheet of glass: “cut into hamburgers.”

The 1956 film version, directed by George Stevens in panoramic 35 millimeter and starring Rock Hudson as the rancher Bick Benedict, Elizabeth Taylor as his wife and James Dean as a ranch hand turned oil tycoon, was better received, won Stevens an Oscar and helped inspire the blockbuster television series “Dallas.”

Ferber’s great-niece, Julie Gilbert, who wrote an excellent biography of her published in 1976 and is a novelist and playwright herself, has now gone back to focus on the development of this one work. Replete with interviews old and new and the comma-challenged, sometimes UPPERCASE notes and correspondence of its strong-willed subject, “Giant Love” is a tender and patient homage to a titan of American letters who has fallen most grievously out of fashion.

And yet, wait a sec, a book about the making of “Giant,” by the late Don Graham, an English professor and Texan himself, was published not seven years ago! Does the world need another?

I say why not, if only for anecdotes like Gilbert’s formative memory of missing a cast dinner party when she was 9 and had contracted the chickenpox. Dean visited her sickroom, counted the marks on her face, told her if she loved Ferber as avowed, “ya better read her stuff,” took a swig from one of her juice glasses and was off. Within the year he’d be dead at 24 following a car crash, enshrined forever as cool dude of the 1950s.

Buckets of ink have been spilled on Dean and the other stars. Gently but firmly, Gilbert recenters her relative in the frame and argues for her relevance at a moment of crisis for democracy — when once again, as Ferber told Eleanor Roosevelt during a 1940 broadcast, “our ivory towers are shaking like a custard.”

She had paid an exploratory visit to Texas the previous year — though sometimes accused of driving by, Ferber was a great one for roaming and research — but found it confounding, even hostile. “Too big,” she decided, for a topic. “Too massively male. Too ruthless and galvanic and overpaced. Too blatant. Too undiluted. Too rich. Too poor.”

But Ferber was haunted by the juxtaposition of Neiman Marcus “millionsmillionsmillions” and braceros living in squalid camps and working for pennies per hour, and felt compelled eventually to work out a story.

Her convictions had been shaped by antisemitism experienced as a schoolgirl in Ottumwa, Iowa, one of many stops for her nomadic Midwestern family, which had uneven fortune in the dry-goods business. Her father, Jacob Ferber, a Hungarian immigrant, went blind and died young. Edna, so named because it had been hoped she would be a boy, Edward, and less proficient at the domestic arts than her older sister, Fannie (“the pretty one”), had worked briefly as a cub reporter and wrote her way past the pain. Her enterprising German mother, Julia, saved her first fiction manuscript from the trash and sent it to a New York publisher, and from there it was up, up and away.

Ferber was nominally a member of the Algonquin Round Table, but with far better work habits than the well-remembered Dorothy Parker, who was perhaps easier to reduce to a concentrated essence. As Dottie tippled and tottered, “Ferb” collaborated richly with the brilliant polymath George S. Kaufman on the plays “Dinner at Eight” and “Stage Door.” She wrote daily for four hours “with her back to the view”; eschewed premieres to take her evening meal at home on a tray in a proto-“girl dinner”; observed an early bedtime; and, though she had many supportive friends, avoided romantic entanglements.

One of her few indulgences was the construction of Treasure Hill, a sprawling country refuge in Connecticut, eventually to be nicknamed Ferber’s Folly, a parallel of sorts to Reata, Bick Benedict’s 825,000-acre ranch in “Giant.”

With all the material and knowledge at her disposal, Gilbert is unable to solve every mystery surrounding this particular piece of intellectual property and its creator. Why did the adventuresome author, a producing partner in the film and rarely shy with feedback, never visit Marfa, the then-segregated town where large swaths of shooting occurred? Was she possibly invited into a threesome with the publisher Blanche Knopf, or — good golly — with Dean and Mercedes McCambridge, who played Benedict’s sister, Luz? “The curtain closes,” Gilbert writes. “I will never know if there was any lover for Ferber other than fame.”

And fame proved so fickle. Is it me, or do we just not see readers toting around big hopeful sagas about the country anymore? Still, with this devoted family member’s efforts, Ferber’s fire burns on, slow and glowing.