Texas State University in San Marcos owns an interesting item, for an institution of higher learning, that is. It is an old, maple canoe paddle and is highly valued there. “The paddle, part of the university’s Wittliff Collections of papers and artifacts from Southwestern literature, was used by John Graves on a trip down the Brazos River in 1957. The book that resulted from that trip, Goodbye to a River, established Mr. Graves a giant in Texas letters and one of the nation’s more elegant...
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“April and May can be magnificent with birdsong and wildflowers and greenery gone crazy, and if good rains come in late August or September, as they often do, early fall can be a sort of verdant second spring before frosts turn red and blue and yellow and crisp.”
John Graves, From a Limestone Ledge
John Graves’ three books Goodbye to a River, Hard Scrabble, and From A Limestone Ledge brought him tremendous respect as a writer of nonfiction as well as Texas, national, and international awards...
For a woman whose famed writing career took her to live in such places as Chicago, New York, Denver, Mexico, and much of Europe, and who rubbed elbows with the likes of Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Frida Kahlo, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Robert Penn Warren, it is a shock to find Katherine Anne Porter’s final resting place is a country cemetery in the middle of Texas. Tiny Indian Creek Cemetery is found in the wide-open spaces where country roads wind their way for miles without...
Chiseled on a plain, pale gray tombstone in a country graveyard in Texas are the words “IN MY END IS MY BEGINNING.” The phrase lies below the outline of a simple cross, the name KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, and the dates May 15, 1890, and September 1980. This granite marker stands beside a darker but smaller granite obelisk-shaped stone propped upon the grave of Mary Alice Porter, who died in 1892. She was Katherine Anne Porter’s (born Callie Russell Porter) mother.
Porter, a woman of LETTERS, the...
Bronze Sculpture of Old Yeller and Travis, in front of the M. Beven Eckert Memorial Library in Mason, Texas.
“It was a wild, lonesome place, down in a deep canyon that was bent in the shape of a horseshoe. Tall trees grew down in the canyon and leaned out over a deep hold of clear water. In the trees nested hundreds of long-shanked herons, blue ones and white ones with black wing tips…. And beneath them, down in the clear water, yard-long catfish lay on the sandy bottom, waiting to gobble up...
Fred Gipson (1908-1973) published his most famous work Old Yeller in 1956. A prolific author of short stories, fiction and non-fiction books, articles, and movie scripts, he was born in the ruggedly beautiful Texas Hill Country. It was a place he loved and could never leave for long. When, after its publication in 1956, Walt Disney bought the movie rights to Old Yeller and hired Gipson to adapt it to film, the author found himself in Hollywood writing the script....
I have a confession to make as I write this piece. I have read only one book by Larry McMurtry and that a nonfiction book titled Paradise. I cannot now find the book (a common problem for me) nor can I remember it well. I did, however, see the movie Terms of Endearment (based on his novel of the same name) replete, as I remember, with complicated mother – daughter, wife – husband, and mother – son relationships, not to mention an eccentric astronaut, Jack Nicholson, no less. I found the movie...
Who would think that Larry McMurtry’s world and that of Chip Gaines’ (former star of HGTV’s Fixer Upper) would ever collide? But as of December 2022, it has. More about that later.
Larry McMurtry left Houston and Texas in 1969. By this time, he had published three novels (Horseman Pass By, Leaving Cheyenne, and The Last Picture Show), a book of essays (In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas), and had his first novel adapted into a movie (Hud). Additionally, he had taught at Texas Christian...
Dorothy Scarborough who is best known for her book The Wind is not a familiar name to most readers of today, but in 1920’s Texas, she was famous—or infamous to some in Sweetwater. Part 1 of this blog post, a couple of posts before this one, discusses her birth in Mt. Carmel, Texas, and how at the age of four, her family moved to Sweetwater in West Texas for her mother’s health. Scarborough lived there for only a few years in the late 1800’s, but the area and her mother’s reaction to it left...
I finally finished reading Dorothy Scarborough's The Wind, a novel that caused quite a stir in West Texas when it was published in 1925. I say I finally finished it because I started it months ago and then stopped reading right in the middle. It was not that I had lost interest in the story but because of the myriads of other projects I had going, and I wasn't giving the book the attention it deserved. I somehow managed, however, to read a few other books along the way, but I had other...