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".
