Texas Historical Literature Texas Historical Literature (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.