Texas Historical Literature

Source: The Handbook of Texas Online

(page 4)

In addition to the Southern, Western, and Urban traditions in Texas fiction, a fourth, the Chicano tradition, has had a definite impact in the past thirty years. Americo Paredes's folkloric study of Texas-Mexican culture, "With His Pistol in His Hand": A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958) reconstructed the story of Gregorio Cortez Lira, a Mexican American who killed an Anglo sheriff in a misunderstanding over the ownership of a horse. Cortez's flight from a huge posse of Texas Rangers inspired corridos celebrating his courage and tenacity, while attacking the rangers for their chauvinistic racism. Paredes's effort to overturn the romanticizing of the rangers by such Anglo authors as Webb and Dobie made his book a seminal text among Mexican-American intellectuals.

Many years later Paredes published a novel written during the late 1930s titled George Washington Gómez (1990), which, among other things, satirized the figure of Dobie as a garrulous racist named K. Hank Harvey, the "Historical Oracle of the State." One Anglo writer, Chester Seltzer, writing under the pen name Amado Muro, wrote so well of Mexican life on the El Paso border that for many years he was assumed to be Mexican American. His Collected Stories appeared in 1971. Tomás Rivera became the first Chicano author of fiction in Texas to win acclaim. In 1970 his "...y no se lo trago la tierra" [...And the Earth Did Not Part], a series of twelve sketches developed in an experimental manner, won the Quinto Sol Award. Stories from this collection have appeared in textbook anthologies of American literature as part of the multicultural movement of the late 1980s and 1990s.

The most prolific Chicano novelist is Rolando Hinojosa, who since 1973 has published a series of interrelated works under the broad title, "The Klail City Death Trip." Set mostly in the valley, his novels employ experimental narrative techniques of multiple voices and documents, placing more emphasis on dialogue and nuance than plot and character. Estampas del valle y otras obras/Sketches of the Valley and Other Works appeared in a bilingual edition in 1973. This work was later recast by Hinojosa in English as The Valley (1983) and is probably his best-known novel. Klail City y sus alrededores [Klail City and its Surroundings], published in 1975, won the Casa de las Americas Prize. Generaciones y semblanzas appeared in 1977. Rites and Witnesses, in 1982, was Hinojosa's first novel written only in English. His other works include Dear Rafe (1950), Partners in Crime (1985), and Becky and her Friends (1990).

The forgotten Texas Chicano novelist is John Rechy, a native of El Paso who has set parts of much of his fiction in that region. He is known nationally for his long-time association with Los Angeles and his frank advocacy of gay themes and sensational material. His Texas-related work includes City of Night (1964), This Day's Death (1969), The Fourth Angel (1972), and Marilyn's Daughter (1988). Other Chicano novels and short stories include Max Martinez, The Adventures of the Chicano Kid and Other Stories (1982), Joseph V. Torres-Metzgar, Below the Summit, and Estela Portillo Trambley, Rain of Scorpions (1975).

Three younger Chicano writers who have received recognition are Lionel Garcia, Sandra Cisneros, and Dagoberto Gilb. Garcia's Hardscrub (1990), a novel about a poor Mexican family growing up on a meager West Texas farm, shared the fiction award of the Texas Institute of Letters in 1990. Sandra Cisneros's politically correct vision of Hispanic feminism found a national audience in her collection of stories, Woman Hollering Creek (1991). Dagoberto Gilb's The Magic of Blood (1993), a strong collection of stories about working-class Hispanics set mostly in El Paso, won the Texas Institute of Letters fiction award.

Short fiction also enjoyed a burst of growth in the postwar era. Traditional stories from O. Henry to Sylvan Karchmer were brought together in 21 Texas Short Stories (1954), edited by William W. Peery. In 1974 James P. White anthologized both well-known and beginning authors in The Bicentennial Collection of Texas Short Stories. A similar mix of established and novice authors appeared in Texas Stories & Poems (1978), edited by Walter McDonald and James P. White. The decade of the 1980s, however, saw the publication of the most numerous collections of short stories, which brought before the public the work of a host of talented writers, including Tom Zigal, Par Carr, James Crumley, Jan Seale, and others.

The principal collections include Her Work: Stories by Texas Women (1982), edited by Lou Rodenberger; South by Southwest: 24 Stories from Modern Texas (1986), edited by Don Graham; Prize Stories: Texas Institute of Letters (1986), edited by Marshall Terry; New Growth: Contemporary Short Stories by Texas Writers (1989), edited by Lyman Grant; Common Bonds: Stories by and about Modern Texas Women (1990), edited by Suzanne Comer; New Growth II: Contemporary Short Stories by Texas Writers (1993), edited by Mark Busby; and Texas Bound: 19 Texas Stories (1994), edited by Kay Cattarulla.

Besides anthologies, numerous individual volumes of short stories by Texas writers were published during the 1970s and 1980s. Carolyn Osborn was one of the most productive and artistic; her collections include A Horse of Another Color (1977), The Fields of Memory (1984), and Warriors and Maidens (1991). Mary Gray Hughes's The Calling (1980) exhibited a high degree of craft, as did Dave Hickey's resurrection of his stories from the 1960s, Prior Convictions (1989).

Afoot in a Field of Men (1983) by Pat Ellis Taylor (who subsequently changed her name to Pat LittleDog) depicted the down-and-out lives of hippie families living in an unglamorous Dallas. Marshall Terry's Dallas Stories (1987) explored the lives of the well-to-do in Dallas, while A. C. Greene's The Highland Park Woman (1983) ranged from the rich suburbs of Dallas to West Texas ranches. Robert Flynn's Seasonal Rain and Other Stories (1986) brought together stories about West Texas, and a second collection, Living with the Hyenas (1995), comprised stories set in West Texas and Vietnam.

Annette Sanford's Lasting Attachments (1989) exhibited a quiet sureness about the lives of Texas women; Jim Sanderson's Bit by the Metal (1993) won the 1992 Kenneth Patchen Prize; Pat Carr's Night of the Luminaries (1986) spoke in spare rhythms of modern themes; Janet Peery's Alligator Dance (1993) employed an energetic vernacular style; Donley Watt's Can You Get There From Here? (1994) used laconism to capture a Texas voice; James Hannah's Desperate Measures (1988) offered dark glimpses into the lives of working-class East Texans; Jan Epton Seale's Airlift and Other Stories (1992) concentrated on revealing the lives of women in Texas; and James Crumley's Whores (1988) brought together the great title story with other quite effective work.

In addition to the proliferation of fiction since World War II, there has been increased activity in organized study and commentary on Texas writing. If the first decades of the century were spent in collecting stories of farm and range, the last decades have been spent in critical classification and commentary. Indeed the 1980s might justly be labeled the Age of Criticism. Two major academic conferences helped point the way. The first, held in 1983 at the University of Texas at Austin, resulted in the publication of The Texas Literary Tradition: Fiction Folklore History, edited by Don Graham, James W. Lee, and William T. Pilkington.

This book contained essays and an extensive bibliography. A second conference was held at North Texas State University in 1986. Centers for the study of Texas and southwestern literature were established at the University of North Texas and Southwest Texas State University. Monographs and collections of essays devoted to such authors as Katherine Anne Porter and Larry McMurtry were plentiful. Throughout the period much lively debate surrounded the whole question of Texas literature. A useful collection showing all sides is Range Wars: Heated Debates, Sober Reflections, and Other Assessments of Texas Writing (1989), edited by Craig Clifford and Tom Pilkington.

There were also several volumes addressing various aspects of Texas writing. William T. Pilkington's My Blood's Country: Studies in Southwestern Literature (1973) was a pioneering examination of Southwestern literature from Cabeza de Vaca to Larry McMurtry. Pilkington's Inventing Texas: The Literature of the Lone Star State (1981) offered a brief survey of developments in Texas writing. A. C. Greene's The Fifty Best Books on Texas stirred up a lot of interest. Later, James W. Lee's Classics of Texas Fiction (1887) contained useful commentary on additional Texas books. C. L. Sonnichsen's From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction (1978) included several chapters highly pertinent to Texas writing. Don Graham's Texas: A Literary Portrait (1986) divided the state into literary regions and reported on interesting work about the state by famous visitors such as Graham Greene and Gertrude Stein.

Drama remains a relatively minor genre in Texas writing, although, according to anthologist William B. Martin, "a solid body of respectable Texas plays does exist." This is not a large assertion, however, and the evidence suggests that it is about all that can be claimed. Texas drama in the twentieth century has generally explored the same themes as fiction. Preston St. Vrain Jones's "Texas Trilogy," the best known plays about Texas, depicted in rather pedestrianly realistic terms the lives of small-town West Texas racists, cheerleaders-cum-waitresses, and crotchety old settlers confronting the challenges of time and modernity.

Although they achieved widespread popularity in the state, they did not succeed in New York. The three plays composing the trilogy, The Knights of the White Magnolia (1973), Lu Ann Hampton Laferty Oberlander (1974), and The Oldest Living Graduate (1974), rarely rise above stereotypes, and the language mainly sticks to rural idioms heavily sprinkled with clichés. Comparisons with Eugene O'Neill proved premature. The work of Horton Foote poses a similar problem. Best known for the numerous films made from his work, Foote is a solid if unexciting dramatist of low-keyed language, quiet action, and genteel manners. The Trip to Bountiful (1954) and 1918 (1974-77) are typical.

With roots in early television, Foote may also be remembered for Harrison, Texas: Eight Television Plays by Horton Foote (1956). Other notable Texas plays include a number of works of strictly regional interest. L. Ramsey Yelvington's A Cloud of Witnesses (1955) tells, for the millionth time, the story of the Alamo, only this time, and not the first, in verse. Exploring small-town Texas life seems to be both a preoccupation and severe limitation for Texas playwrights.

Oliver Hailey's Who's Happy Now? (1967) and Kith and Kin (1986) probe in a comic vein the lives of close-knit small-town Texas families. Jack Heifner's short plays, such as Vanities (1977), Porch (1977), and Patio (1978), combine Texas comic idioms with less sunny appraisals of lives spent in provincial settings. Mary Rohde's Ladybuy, Ladybug, Fly Away Home (1977) explores feminist themes in a small-town beauty-parlor setting. James McLure exploits good-ol'-boy stereotypes in Lone Star (1979), a study of the effect of the Vietnam War on a returning veteran, and in Laundry and Bourbon (1980) he examines the women in the lives of the characters of the earlier play.

In plays such as The Night Hank Williams Died (1989) Larry L. King has tried to tap the same success that he enjoyed with his comic portrayal of life in a small town in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978), co-written with Peter Masterson. This musical play, based upon King's journalistic piece about the closing of the Chicken Ranch, a famous brothel outside La Grange, Texas, had a long run on Broadway. Also worth mentioning is John Logan's Jack Ruby, All-American Boy (1970). One black playwright who has utilized Texas materials is Ted Shine, whose Shoes (1970) examines racial themes against the background of an exclusive Dallas country club. On balance, Texas drama has a long way to go before it produces any work equal to that of such national dramatists as Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, or Tennessee Williams.

Before World War II Texas poetry flourished, but without distinction. There were many local poets of modest ability, and nearly every town counted a local versifier or two among its denizens. State government selected a poet laureate, but in general the poetasters honored with the title were no more distinguished than the politicians who appointed them. Typical is John Lang Sinclair, a representative poet of the day who is remembered only for the song "The Eyes of Texas."

Poets in the early part of the century were often influenced by minor poets of the past rather than the more invigorating new poets who were producing the most significant American verse of the century, such as the modernists Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. Instead, Texas poets chose minor nineteenth-century Southern poets as their models, such men as Henry Timrod and Sidney Lanier, or, in the twentieth-century, such backward-looking poets as Rupert Brooke, a British poet killed in World War I, or rhymesters like Joyce Kilmer, author of "Trees."

A generous sampling of Texas poetry during the early part of the century appears in Hilton Ross Greer's anthology Voices of the Southwest: A Book of Texan Verse (1923). Altogether too many of these poems are cloyed with phony archaic diction-"o'er" and "hath" and "begirt"-and altogether too many invoke Love and such personified abstractions. Few were the poems that actually drew upon the Texas landscape or culture or people in any convincing way. Two more anthologies, Texas Poets (1936) and The Greater Texas Anthology of Verse (1939), contain hundreds of poems by, as R. S. Gwynn puts it, "stereotypical trinomial poetesses with resonant names" such as Ura Link Eckhardt and Corrie Birdsong Teagarden.

Gywnn concludes justly that "a mere recitation of the table of contents of Texas Poets surpasses the lyricism of the poems collected in it." Easily the most prolific and best known Texas poet of the late Twenties onward was Grace Noll Crowell, who published twenty-two volumes between 1928 and 1959. During her stint as poet laureate she published a small book of Texas poems in honor of the Texas Centennial. Bright Destiny (1936) contains her best, most concrete work, but most of her poetry was in the inspirational vein and is collected in Poems of Inspiration and Courage (1965).

Still, from the 1930s there are a few poets who at least occasionally broke away from the pallid verse of sentimental idealism and Christian bromides and sought to wring poems out of the Texas earth. Karle Wilson Baker, for example, in Dreamers on Horseback (1929), tried to capture the differing moods of Texas in her sequence "Some Towns of Texas," and in her poem "Song of the Forerunners" she assessed the differing contributions made to Texas history by men and women. Berta Hart Nance's "Cattle," from Flute in the Distance (1935), contains the often-quoted couplet: "Other states were carved or born,/ Texas grew from hide and horn."

Another poet of the 1930s, long since ignored, was Lexie Dean Robertson. Red Heels (1928) contained some interesting realistic poems about life in oilfield boomtowns, including "Aftermath," which recounts the ravages upon land and spirit following the end of a boom. In Acorn on the Roof (1939) Robertson included twelve Texas poems, some in dialect and all in plain, straightforward diction. "Carbon Black," for example, tells in dialect the story of a woman and a community ruined by industrial pollution, an unusual subject for Texas poetry of that era. I Keep a Rainbow (1932) also contained some poems dealing realistically with homely Texas subjects. Boyce House, a Fort Worth newspaperman known primarily for his collections of Texas jokes and stories, wrote poems of considerable vitality.

Texas Rhythms (1936) contained a number of original poems, including "Texas Poets," a prescient analysis of the poetic scene in the Centennial year. House began, "You write about bluebonnets" and urged poets instead to write about the events, past and present, that make Texas unique. He mentions such available subjects as "Clyde and Bonnie" and "Farmer Jim and Ma Ferguson," concluding, "And yet, Texas poets, you swoon when you behold a dew-/ drop enfolded by a rose!" Interestingly, Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow's gun moll, wrote ballads that have more verve than the piles of poetry about bluebonnets, mockingbirds, and the Alamo produced by most of the poet laureates of the era.

During the 1940s and 1950s, and increasingly in the following decades, Texas poetry had its greatest period of development. More technically accomplished poets began to publish, with a keener sense of English and American poetic traditions. Several wrote in traditional meters and genres. Arthur M. Sampley, a university-trained poet, brought out This Is Our Time in 1943 and Selected Poems, 1937-1971 in 1971. In such volumes as Man Now (1954) and A Beginning (1966) William Burford exhibited a technical facility with a willingness to treat, in some poems, specifically Texas materials.

Robert Lee Brothers, Jr., displayed a strong affinity with the poetry of Emily Dickinson in tightly disciplined verse in the poems collected in Democracy of Dust (1947) and The Hidden Harp (1952). William Barney, deeply influenced by Robert Frost, revealed a keen eye for Texas customs and rhythms in Kneel from the Stone (1952) and The Killdeer Crying (1977), edited by Dave Oliphant. Martin Staples Shockley published a number of clever poems about Texas landscapes and Texas critters that have been collected in Last Roundup: Selected Published and Unpublished Works 1994). Joseph Colin Murphey's A Return to the Landscape (1979) presented spare, unsentimental, and at times deeply moving portraits of Texas folk. Gene Shuford wrote of gunfighters and other frontier topics in taut verse; his Selected Poems appeared in 1972. Vassar Miller's poems began appearing in book form in 1960 and were collected in 1991 in If I Had Wheels of Love.

Intense, concentrated, and characterized by religious and philosophical themes, Miller's work, which has an audience beyond the state, has little Texas resonance. Novelist R. G. Vliet also wrote poetry of note, including Events & Celebrations (1966), The Man with the Black Mouth (1970), and a long ballad, Clem Maverick: The Life and Death of a Country Music Singer (1983). One of the most prolific of the poets of the Seventies is Dave Oliphant, who has adapted the techniques and free-verse rhythms of William Carlos Williams to Texas subjects. Oliphant's volumes include Lines & Mounds (1976), Footprints (1978), Maria's Poems (1987), and Austin (1985), a book-length poetic history of the city that is the longest of his series of poems titled "Texas Towns and Cities."

A number of other poets have written verse attempting to come to grips with the specific local facts of Texas culture and history. Charles Behlen's Perdition's Keepsake (1978) belongs in this category, as do Sandra Lynn's I Must Hold These Strengths (1980) and Where Rainbows Wait for Rain: The Big Bend Country (1989); Betsy Colquitt's Honor Card & Other Poems (1980); Naomi Sahib Nye's Different Ways to Pray (1980) and Hugging the Juke Box (1982); Betty Adcock's Beholdings (1988); Jerry Bradley's Simple Versions of Disaster (1981); and Leon Stokesbury's Often in Different Landscapes (1976).

Among Chicano poets, Rosemary Catacalos in Again for the First Time (1984) writes of Mexican and Anglo lives intertwined in Texas culture, chiefly in and around San Antonio. Ray Gonzalez in Twilights and Chants (1987) demonstrates a feeling for landscapes and solitudes. Carmen Tafolla's Sonnets to Human Beings (1987) probes states of feeling and culture among Mexican Americans. Tino Villanuevo's Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993) is a substantial narrative poem that relates the impact of the celebrated Hollywood film upon a young Chicano boy living in San Marcos, Texas. Black poets who have contributed their views of contemporary Texas include Lorenzo Thomas and Harryette Mullen. Susan Wood deserves mention for her precisely rendered poems in Campo Santo.

Albert Goldbarth, a nationally recognized poet who lived in Texas for a number of years, produced one of the most interesting long poems in the state's history, in his Different Fleshes: a novel/poem (1979), a richly allusive modernist poem intermingling Paris of the 1920s with Round Rock, Texas, from the Sam Bass era forward. Other poets who have been active in chapbook publication include Thomas Whitbread, David Yates, James Hoggard, Paul Woodruff, Rick Sale, J. M. Linebarger, Stan Rice, Paul Foreman, Terry Wiggs, and Karl Kopp. Among the most prolific and award-winning poets of Texas in the 1970s and 1980s is Walter McDonald, whose poems have appeared in many national quarterlies and collected in such volumes as Caliban in Blue and Other Poems (1976), One Thing Leads to Another (1978), Working Against Time (1981), and Rafting the Brazos (1988). In the mid-1990s McDonald was probably the most Texas-rooted poet with the highest standing in and outside the state.

During the 1980s poetry in Texas underwent the same kind of dialectical debate that surrounded fiction. One group championed the "nativist" position that Texas poets, following in the tradition of William Carlos Williams, should develop a poetry based on local conditions that looked inward and not to Europe or the classical past for inspiration. The other view proposed that poets should draw upon modernist and postmodernist currents to produce a poetry of "otherness" resistant to long-standing traditions of frontier Protestant conservatism and chauvinism. Surveying Texas poetry in 1987, William Lockwood observed that there is "no nationally recognized poetic voice resident in Texas."

Although his assessment is correct, there is no dearth of Texas poets trying to find their voice and a larger audience. Poetry in Texas continues to be among the liveliest genres of writing. Small presses, local quarterlies, anthologies, symposia, and local poetry readings constantly spring up to stimulate poetic activity. Texas in Poetry: A 150-Year Anthology (1994), edited by Billy Bob Hill, offered Texans a fine opportunity to assess the poetic traditions of the state, ranging from established figures such as William Barney and Walter McDonald to promising newcomers such as Violette Newton and Betsy Berry. A succession of annuals published by the University of North Texas, New Texas '91 through New Texas '95, continues to bring together the most recent work in short fiction and poetry. These and other publications by regional and small presses ensure a lively, ongoing field of poetic production.

Go to the previous page
Go back to the main page