Veda Tebbs Hale was born in 1936 and grew up in Panguitch, Utah. She graduated from BYU in 1957, the same year she married her husband Glen Hale. Together the Hales lived in Japan, California, and Murray, Utah where they raised their three sons. Before retiring to St. George, Utah in 1990, Hale taught elementary school. After retirement, Hale pursued her love of art with her works sold in a summer gallery in Panguitch, Utah near her family cabin. In St. George, Hale learned that Maurine Whipple, the author of The Giant Joshua, was still living and a friendship began. In researching Whipple to write her biography, Hale took notes on personal conversations and conducted oral history interviews with Whipple to supplement her research through Whipple’s archival collection housed at BYU. Additionally, Hale helped Whipple delve through some papers that remained in her home, occasionally editing or reconstructing unpublished short stories. Hale created copious notes and gives the details of when and how a piece of Whipple’s writing came to be. Hale published “Swell Suffering”: A Biography of Maurine Whipple in 2009. In 2012 when her husband passed away Veda moved to Lindon, Utah to be near one of her sons.

Maurine Whipple was born January 20, 1903 in St. George, Utah the oldest child of Charlie Whipple and Annie McAllister Whipple. As a child, Whipple knew her grandmothers and grew up hearing about their lives, Mormonism, and polygamy, which later influenced her writing. Whipple attended college in Salt Lake City at the University of Utah and graduated in 1926. Whipple taught in several different schools after graduation, never staying at one for more than a year throughout most of the Great Depression. Whipple had many failed relationships and a very short-lived marriage during this time. Whipple struggled all of her life with finding gainful employment and a fulfilling romantic relationship. In 1938, Whipple received a fellowship for new and unpublished writers from Houghton Mifflin, a large publishing company, after she submitted samples of her novel, The Giant Joshua. Whipple struggled to finish her writing, and even spent some time in an artist colony, Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York in order to complete the novel. Three years later in 1941, The Giant Joshua was published and received mixed reviews. In January 1941, The Giant Joshua was listed 9th on the New York Herald’s “What America is Reading” list, but it was not well received in her hometown of St. George. After her book came out, Whipple was consistently disappointed by the amount of money she earned for her efforts as a writer. Always intending to expand The Giant Joshua into a trilogy, Whipple sought money to support herself by writing numerous magazine articles and one non-fiction book, This is the Place: Utah. Whipple lived periodically for short periods in other states, but spent the majority of her life in St. George and the surrounding towns. Later in life, she lived in La Verkin, Utah when a friend, Carol Jensen Becker, became her legal guardian in the late 1980s. Whipple passed away in 1992.