Texas Historical
Literature
Source: The Handbook of Texas Online
(page 3)
In addition to agriculture,
East Texas was also the site of several important
oilfield discoveries, and several novels have explored
the impact of the oil industry on the lives of small
communities in that region. Karle Wilson Baker's Family
Style (1937) describes the changes wrought by the oil
boom upon the life of a farm woman. Mary King O'Donnell's
Quincie Bolliver (1941) also looks at oil-boom days from
the perspective of the working class, in this instance a
muleskinner's daughter. Jewel H. Gibson's Black Gold
(1950) humorously examines the rowdy life of roughnecks
in the oil patch. William A. Owens's Fever in the Earth
(1958), set during the boom days following the opening of
the Spindletop oilfield, studies the effects of instant
wealth upon rural Southerners in the Beaumont area at the
turn of the century.
Two other writers round out the picture of the Southern
tradition. Madison A. Cooper's Sironia, Texas (1952) is a
whopping two-volume, 1,100,000-word portrait of
postbellum aristocratic families in Waco. Frederick B.
Gipson of central Texas enjoyed considerable success with
novels dealing on agrarian and hunting themes that
embodied the flavor of Southern mores. Hound-dog Man
(1949), The Home Place (1950), and Old Yeller (1956), a
very popular juvenile novel set on the frontier, were all
made into films.
Despite the accomplishment of Southern writers in the
state, however, those who have written in the Western
tradition have dominated the nation's popular conception
of Texas. Two seminal writers in this configuration are
J. Frank Dobie and Walter Prescott Webb. Dobie's prolific
reading and collecting of ranch lore led to such books as
The Longhorns (1941), The Mustangs (1952), and Cow People
(1964), instant classics in the literature of the cattle
culture. Webb, probably the most influential Western
historian since Frederick Jackson Turner, is best known
for The Texas Rangers (1935), a romanticized, celebratory
account of the exploits of the state's most famous
frontier law-enforcement agency, and The Great Plains
(1931), a work of lasting impact in the study of the
economy and ecology of the arid Western plains states. By
ignoring East Texas and cotton culture, the work of Dobie
and Webb strongly contributed to promulgating a picture
of Texas as a Western state dominated by dust and cattle.
Unintentionally, their version of Texas accorded
perfectly with the Wild West, shoot-'em-up images being
circulated in the works of popular novelists such as Zane
Grey and in hundreds of Western movies.
Though other writers in the Western tradition active in
the 1930s have been all but eclipsed by the popularity of
Dobie and Webb, three deserve to be better known: Edward
E. Anderson, Winifred Sanford,q and Edwin M. Lanham, Jr.
Anderson's Thieves Like Us (1937) is a hard-boiled tale
of Bonnie-and-Clyde-type outlaws that has been filmed
twice. Lanham, who produced several serious novels in the
1930s before turning to detective fiction, is easily the
most neglected of Texas novelists. His The Wind Blew West
(1935) is a complex study of the shifting fortunes of a
small town bypassed by the railroad. The novel includes a
fascinating retelling of the Warren Wagontrain Raid and
the subsequent trial of the Indian defendants. Thunder in
the Earth (1941) is a noteworthy addition to a largely
undistinguished body of Texas fiction that deals with the
oil and gas industry. Winifred Sanford, a protégé of H.
L. Mencken, published a number of excellent stories about
women in Texas in the 1930s that were collected in
Windfall and Other Stories (1988). Another writer of the
Great Depression era who has recently resurfaced is
Chicago-based Nelson Algren. The Texas Stories of Nelson
Algren, edited by Betinna Drew, appeared in 1994.
Nonfiction writers following in the wake of Dobie and
Webb have produced a number of notable works dealing with
Western life in Texas. Edward C. Abbott's rollicking We
Pointed Them North (with Helena Huntington Smith, 1939)
is a wonderfully entertaining account of cattle drives
and flesh-and-blood cowboys. Tom (Thomas Calloway) Lea's
two-volume The King Ranch (1957) is a sumptuous history
of the state's most famous cattle ranch. Paul Horgan's
Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History
(1954) retells crucial events in Texas history better
than anyone ever has. J. Evetts Haley's Charles
Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman (1936), the definitive
biography of the state's most famous cattleman, is a rich
source of information about the cattle kingdom. Sally
Reynolds Matthews' Interwoven: A Pioneering Chronicle
(1936) offers an engaging account of ranching life in
West Texas from a patrician woman's point of view.
Dobie's interest in nature, a strong corollary of his
devotion to ranch life, influenced the work of subsequent
writers. One was his close friend, Roy Bedichek, whose
Adventures of a Texas Naturalist (1948) ranged far and
wide in its depiction of natural lore, including
memorable chapters on the northern mockingbird and
chickens. Bedichek's letters to Dobie, Webb, and many
other correspondents, collected in Letters of Roy
Bedichek (1985), edited by William A. Owens and Lyman
Grant, are one of the real treasures of Texas writing. In
the next generation John Graves became the heir of the
Dobie-Bedichek vein of natural history and legend. His
Goodbye to a River (1960), an account of a canoe trip
down the Brazos River in the late 1950s, is one of the
most honored books in Texas letters. Hard Scrabble (1974)
and From a Limestone Ledge (1980) are substantive
additions to the bookshelf of Texas nature lore.
More recently, Stephen Harrigan
has followed the Dobie-Bedichek line of close observation
of man's interaction with his ecological environment in
two collections of essays, A Natural State (1988) and
Comanche Moon (1995). His two novels, Aransas (1980) and
Jacob's Well (1985) also pursue ecological themes.
Another follower of the naturalist tradition is Rick
Bass, whose The Deer Pasture (1985) and Oil Notes (1989)
provide scrupulous examinations of local conditions, of
how men and women exploit or revere the earth. Dan L.
Flores's Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of
the Southern Plains (1990) won the admiration of
ecologists and nature writers.
In fiction, two Western-oriented novelists of the
post-World War II era have consistently mined the
Dobie-Webb legacy. Benjamin Capps has written about
cattle drives (The Trail to Ogallala, 1964), told the
story of the settlement of West Texas by a Goodnight-like
pioneer (Sam Chance, 1965), retold the story of Cynthia
Ann Parker (A Woman of the People, 1969), portrayed the
clash of Comanche and white culture at the turn of the
century (The White Man's Road, 1969), and recreated the
failed Utopian community of La Réunion (The Brothers of
Uterica, 1967). All are narrated in a low-key manner
reminiscent of Andy Adams.
Elmer Kelton, whose best work
has dealt with twentieth-century ranching, began his
career by writing for Western pulp magazines and broke
into hardcover after a succession of well-researched but
formulaic paperbacks. His hardcover publications include
novels about the past: The Day the Cowboys Quit (1971),
based on the "cowboy strike" of the 1880s; The
Wolf and the Buffalo (1980), a novel of the clash between
Indian and United States Cavalry troops on the West Texas
frontier that features an Indian warrior and a black
soldier; and Stand Proud (1984), another frontier saga of
a rugged individualist. Kelton's novels about
twentieth-century ranch life are probably his best. The
Good Old Boys (1978) is a comic study of a charming,
footloose cowboy who resists the blandishments of the
automobile and marriage in favor of a rambling life. Best
of all is The Time It Never Rained (1973), the portrait
of a dogged old rancher named Charlie Flagg, who survives
the terrible drought of the 1950s without succumbing to
federal assistance. Several of the novels of Capps and
Kelton have won awards from Western Writers of America.
Although Capps and Kelton represent an earnestness of
spirit and a reliable base of research and experience,
their novels are generally characterized by a provincial
flatness not unlike the sparse landscapes from which they
spring. They are also curiously genteel in language and
incident, as mild as Dobie. But flint-hard Protestantism
has its limitations when it comes to representing
"the way we live now," the goal of all
novelists working in the terrain of their own time. The
same genteel hands-off tone handicaps the productions of
West Texas women novelists of the post-World War II
period. Loula Grace Erdman's The Edge of Time (1950) and
Jane Gilmore Rushing's Against the Moon (1968) equally
suffer from a tameness of language and vision.
If literary history were as tidy as the historian would
like, then Capps and Kelton would have written all of
their works in the 1950s, leaving the field open to the
iconoclastic Larry McMurtry, the most important figure in
Texas writing since Dobie. But it did not happen that
way. In 1961, before Capps, before Kelton, McMurtry
published his first novel, Horseman, Pass By. It inverted
the classic form of the genre (Shane) and introduced a
level of irony and sexual frankness into the old pastoral
world of the courtly cowpoke that made old-timers cringe
and made McMurtry for a time the enfant terrible of Texas
letters. All through the 1960s McMurtry continued to
explore the passing of an era and its replacement by a
less kind, less gentle way of life, in novels such as
Leaving Cheyenne (1963), The Last Picture Show (1966),
and a book of valuable reflections, In a Narrow Grave:
Essays on Texas (1968). At the end of the decade and into
the next, he turned his attention to urban life in Texas
in the so-called Houston trilogy: Moving On (1970), All
My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers (1972), and Terms of
Endearment (1975). No fewer than four of these first six
novels were turned into films, three of which won major
Academy Awards.
Having said all he had to say about Texas, it seemed, McMurtry then wrote several novels set either completely or mostly outside the state. Cadillac Jack (1982) is the best of these. Then, in 1985, in a famous reversal of his published animadversions against Texas writers enfeebled by a nostalgic love of the past, he brought out Lonesome Dove, a blockbuster novel of epic sweep that drew upon all the old traditions of cattle-drive lore and Texas Rangers, salted with a healthy and by now familiar dose of sex and ultraviolence. The result was a best-seller that outstripped James Michener's sodden doorstop of a novel, Texas (1986), and garnered its author, now transformed into the éminence grise of Texas letters, a Pulitzer Prize. Since that high point, McMurtry has continued to produce novels at a rapid rate, though none has achieved the popularity of Lonesome Dove.
In two novels he turned to
other legendary Western materials, the Billy the Kid (see
MCCARTY, HENRY) legend in Anything for Billy (1988) and
Calamity Jane in Buffalo Girls (1990). He also recycled
many of his earlier novels in a series of sequels.
Texasville (1987) comically updated the characters of The
Last Picture Show; Some Can Whistle (1990) reprised the
Beat writer Danny Deck from All My Friends Are Going To
Be Strangers; and The Evening Star (1992) was a
lackluster sequel to Terms of Endearment. Lonesome Dove
itself spawned two spin-off novels. Streets of Laredo
(1993), one of McMurtry's darkest works, told the story
of Woodrow Call and other survivors from the precursor
novel; and Dead Man's Walk (1995), a "prequel,"
placed a young Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae amid the
bloody events of the Mier expedition of 1842.
McMurtry's claim to being the most important Texas writer
in the Western tradition has received a very strong
challenge from Cormac McCarthy, a Tennessee-based author
who, before moving to Texas, had established himself as a
writer of impeccable credentials with several novels
deeply imbued with the influence of William Faulkner. In
the early 1980s McCarthy moved to El Paso and since then
has produced three novels of extraordinary merit. Blood
Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) is an
elegant and incredibly violent frontier saga of torture,
murder, and redemption. All the Pretty Horses (1992) won
for its author just about every prestigious literary
award in the country and, on top of that, was a national
best-seller. A coming-of-age story written in beautiful
cadences, it was the first in a projected "Border
Trilogy"; the second installment, The Crossing,
appeared in 1994. McCarthy's brooding artistic commitment
sets a standard for all Texas writers to emulate.
The brand of realism inaugurated by McMurtry and others
in the early 1960s led to a considerable amount of
revisionist, post-Dobie-era fiction dealing with the
Western side of Texas culture. Though writers in this
category are too numerous to mention, some stand out.
Russell G. Vliet brought a poet's sensibility to his
highly subjective, lyricist fiction in such novels as
Rock Spring (1974), Solitudes (1977), and Scorpio Rising
(1985). Robert Flynn has displayed a wide fictional
breadth, first in his parodic cattle-drive novel, North
to Yesterday (1967), which anticipated many of the themes
of Lonesome Dove, and then in the witty, satirical
small-town novel Wanderer Springs (1987). John Irsfeld's
gritty Little Kingdoms (1976) adapted
multiple-point-of-view techniques to tell a modern outlaw
story set in West Texas. Max Crawford produced a wild,
exaggerated, stylistically exuberant tale of modern West
Texas in Waltz Across Texas (1975), then turned to the
frontier clash between cavalry and Indians in Lords of
the Plain (1985), narrated in a quiet period voice of the
1870s.
Andrew Jolly, in the underrated
novel A Time of Soldiers (1976), told a history of a
family of soldiers spanning the years from the Mexican
Revolution through the Vietnam War. James Lee Burke's Lay
Down My Sword and Shield (1971), a political novel set in
the explosive 1960s, looked back to Texas history and the
Korean War. C. W. Smith's Thin Men of Haddam (1973)
offered a sensitive, carefully wrought story of conflicts
between Anglos and Mexicans in South Texas. Edwin
Shrake's Blessed McGill (1968) possessed an originality
rarely seen in historically based Westerns. Clay Reynolds
exhibited a great deal of versatility in three novels set
in West Texas: The Vigil (1986), a town-centered
allegory; Agatite (1986), released in paperback as Rage,
a brooding, violent novel; and Franklin's Crossing
(1992), a big-canvas historical novel about a black
frontiersman.
West Texas has also produced a number of essayists. Larry
L. King's collections such as ...And Other Dirty Stories
(1968) and The Old Man and Lesser Mortals (1974)
represent the best of his work. A. C. Greene's A Personal
Country (1979) describes manners and mores in and around
Abilene, his home region. Allan R. Bosworth's New Country
(1962) is a lively memoir of growing up in West Texas.
Two works set in the brush country and south of there, in
the lower Rio Grande valley, are J. Houghton Allen's
Southwest (1952) and Hart Stilwell's Uncovered Wagon
(1947). Also of note are three collections of essays.
James Ward Lee's Texas, My Texas (1993) offers a
slumgullion of perceptive comments on Texas popular
culture; Gary Cartwright's Confessions of a Washed-Up
Sportswriter (Including Various Digressions about Sex,
Crime and Other Hobbies) (1982) is a consistently lively
and entertaining account of subjects ranging from Jack
Ruby to newspaper reporting in Fort Worth; Joe Bob
Briggs's A Guide to Western Civilization, or My Story
(1982) is an extremely funny and clever look at Texas
from a vernacular redneck perspective. Briggs is the pen
name of John Bloom, who achieved national prominence in
the 1980s for his comic reviews of drive-in movies.
In 1981 McMurtry, in a controversial essay, "Ever a
Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas
Writing," faulted Texas authors for having ignored
the life of the cities. Although no Texas writer could
lay claim to having produced a significant body of work
about urban life, many had set novels in cities. The best
urban novel is unquestionably Billy (William) Lee
Brammer's The Gay Place (1961), an elegantly written work
set in Austin that depicts the life and times of a
larger-than-life governor based closely upon Lyndon B.
Johnson. Other notable urban novels include Philip Atlee,
The Inheritors (1940), Fort Worth; George Williams, The
Blind Bull (1952), Houston; Al Dewlin, The Bone-Pickers
(1958), Amarillo; Edwin Shrake, But Not For Love (1964),
Fort Worth, and Strange Peaches (1972), Dallas; Bryan
Woolley, November 22 (1981), Dallas; Laura Furman, The
Shadow Line (1982), Houston; Peter Gent, North Dallas
Forty (1973), Dallas; and Peter LaSalle, Strange Sunlight
(1984), Austin. Shelby Hearon deserves special mention in
this context.
In a series of novels set
variously in Austin (Hannah's House, 1975), New Braunfels
(A Prince of a Fellow, 1978), San Antonio (Owning Jolene,
1989), Waco Hug Dancing, 1991), and rural Texas (Now and
Another Time, 1976, and Life Estates, 1994), Hearon has
proved herself a shrewd and prolific observer of
upper-class manners and mores in modern Texas. Beverly
Lowry also contributed two novels about Texas: Daddy's
Girl (1979) was set in Houston, and The Perfect Sonya
(1987) caused a minor stir in Texas literary circles for
its transparent portrait of an affair between the heroine
and the state's most distinguished writer of rural
beatitudes. Dan Jenkins has mined his native Fort Worth
for humorous Texas stereotypes in a number of popular
comic novels, including Semi-Tough (1972), Baja Oklahoma
(1981), and Fast Copy (1988). Sarah Bird also treats
urban life in comic terms in such novels as Alamo House:
Women Without Men, Men Without Brains (1986), a very
funny look at Austin academic culture, and The Mommy Club
(1991), set in San Antonio.
Any reckoning of urban literature in Texas should also
take into account what is almost a separate type-the
true-crime story. Foremost in this genre are Thomas
Thompson's Blood and Money (1976), which deals with the
John Hill murder case in Houston, and Gary Cartwright's
Blood Will Tell (1979), a study of the Cullen Davis
murder case in Fort Worth. Both were national
best-sellers. Formulaic detective and crime fiction has
also produced a readership for an increasing number of
crime-genre novelists, including David L. Lindsey, A. W.
Gray, Jay Brandon, Bill Crider, Kinky Friedman, Doug
Swanson, and Mary Willis Walker.
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