Early reviews of Giants in the Earth were highly favorable. Writing in the Chicago Dally News, Carl Sandburg called the story "so terrible and panoramic, piling up its facts with incessantly subtle intimations, that it belongs among the books to be kept and cherished." Walter Vogdes wrote in The Nation that "We may wish desperately that Rolvaag could have ended his tale in triumph and satisfaction But no, Rolvaag had to stand close to the facts and the truth." In his introduction to the novel, Lincoln Colcord, Rolvaag's co-translator, called the work unique for being "so palpably European in its art and atmosphere, so distinctly American in everything it deals with."

Other contemporary evaluations were equally positive. Historian Henry Commager called the novel "a milestone on American literature" and "the most penetrating and mature depictment of the westward movement in our literature." Scandinavian studies scholar Julius...