Brenda Ethridge Ferguson | Updates

Book Review: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Sat, 1 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Thomas, Louisa Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams 2016. 500 pp. Penguin Press ISBN 9781594204

In this biography of Mrs. John Quincy Adams, Louisa Thomas provides a front-seat, panoramic view of world-changing history within the scope of a woman’s personal story, a woman with hopes and dreams and, yet, a destiny, perhaps, she would not knowingly have chosen. It can appear that during this time, free men largely selected their paths—sometimes highly sacrificial paths—and women simply accepted theirs. If that is so, many women garnered superhuman strength along the way as Mrs. Adams seemed to do.

John and Abigail Adams expected their son to marry an American much like himself. Louisa Catherine Johnson was only “negligibly” an American. Though her father had taught his children they were Americans, Louisa had never seen the United States when she met John Quincy.

Louisa was born in London, England, on February 12, 1775, to Joshua and Catherine Johnson. Her mother was a charming, vivacious English woman and her father a wealthy American merchant and patriot. Johnson had lived many years in London as a buyer for an Annapolis firm. Before Louisa’s birth, he and his family had briefly lived in Maryland, but Louisa had only lived in England and a few years in France while the American Revolutionary War was raging.

In 1790, Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State, named Joshua Johnson the American consul in London. The family lived in a beautiful mansion on Tower Hill, near the Tower of London. By this time, Johnson had become a partner in an American trade firm called Wallace, Johnson, and Muir. Because Johnson was much admired as an American patriot with numerous political connections, most high-placed Americans made their way to the Johnson home whenever they were abroad. Louisa met John Quincy Adams in 1795, a diplomatic minister to the Netherlands, at dinner in her parents’ home. At this first meeting, Louisa was twenty years old, and John Quincy was around twenty-eight.

The two young people were not at all alike. She was bright, happy, stylish, and light-hearted. He was often grave and serious. Louisa had only heard about the hardships of the American Revolution, but John Quincy had lived them as a child. He was brought up by duty-conscious parents to love country above all else except God, and a strong sense of commitment hung about his character. Despite their differences, they were drawn to one another and married on July 26, 1797, in a fine wedding given by her parents.. A dark problem loomed, however. Louisa’s father’s firm had gone bankrupt shortly before the wedding, and he had not told the couple. He could not pay the dowry. In this period, a breach of the marriage agreement would have allowed Adams to obtain an annulment, and Louisa feared John Quincy might think her dishonest. Although he did not indicate any such thought to her, she never fully recovered from the disappointment. The dowry, a custom of the upper classes, was in large part, the wife’s way of feeling she had contributed to the support of her family. Because she brought no money into the family when she married, Louisa spent much of her life feeling she had little right to a say in family affairs.

The same year as the wedding, President John Adams appointed his son Minister of Prussia. Louisa and her new husband moved to Berlin where she had to be presented to the Prussian court. Louisa was a huge success, quickly learning the acceptable protocols. Queen Louise and Countess Pauline Neale particularly liked her. One would expect John Quincy to be thrilled by this development, but he was not. He was a thorough believer in republics and in republican virtues, disliking anything to do with royalty and courts. Still, he had to be diplomatic as his mission was to improve U.S. standing among the Europeans and to encourage Prussia to be neutral in disputes between England and France in order to keep Europe out of U.S. affairs. Louisa was a huge asset even though her husband and his parents feared she would become too enamored of court life and not embody the principals of her country. John Quincy, in fact, did not believe women should have any part in politics and that royalty and courts were a corruption as evidenced by the very fact that women were involved in them.

Thus began Louisa and John Quincy Adams’s life together, a life filled with duty and adventure both at home in the United States and abroad in the courts of Europe. They found themselves living in cultures and environs as diverse as Prussia, rural Massachusetts, Boston, Washington D.C., Russia, Paris, and London. During these heady times, Louisa also suffered miscarriages, the death of a little daughter, separations from her sons, loneliness, self-imposed tensions with Abigail, and physical separations from her husband. Occasionally, she had to meet danger head-on. In a particularly dramatic instance during the Napoleonic Wars, she was forced to cross treacherous territory between Russia and Paris with only her young son in tow.

During her life, Louisa was to be a congressional wife, the wife of the Secretary of State, the daughter-in-law of one President, and the wife of another with all the rewards and hardships of those positions. She faced continued tragedy as she grew older, losing her beloved parents, Abigail, and then John Adams to whom she had grown particularly close, addressing him as Father. She and John Quincy lost their eldest son to suicide at age 28, their second son at age 31, and even outlived the second son’s wife and two daughters. Their third son and wife, however, provided sunshine. They had seven children, all of whom lived to become prominent citizens.

When John Quincy Adams collapsed on the House floor in Washington D.C. in February of 1848, once again a congressman after leaving the Presidency, Louisa was to have little say in his treatment. As he lay dying in the Speaker’s room, congressional members decided that the women should leave (perhaps believing watching his death would be too difficult for them). Louisa was sent home. She was grief-stricken at not being allowed to stay. Louisa was to live three more years after her husband’s death. After she died, her son Charles, her only remaining child wrote in his diary “…her going leaves a blank which nothing can replace (455).”

———BEF

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Literary Texas: Sandra Cisneros

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Literary Texas: Sandra Cisneros

I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. —Sandra Cisneros

In 2015, Texas State University’s Alkek Library acquired Sandra Cisneros’ literary archive. The archive, housed at the Wittliff Collections, includes manuscripts, correspondence, diaries, journals, and numerous other items pertaining to her life and work, a work which has long been the focus of many professors, scholars, and readers. Cisneros has said her hope is that the collection, which represents her path to writing, will encourage students and other writers, even though it exposes the amount of hard work that writing well demands. According to Director of the Wittcliff Collections, David Coleman, students rather than be discouraged should recognize what can be accomplished by such labor (Cisneros-Lunsford, Anastasia, “Sandra Cisneros’ works find home in The Wittliff.”).

Sandra Cisneros was born in 1954 in Chicago, and it was there where she grew up. Her father, Alfredo Cisneros de Moral, was Mexican and her mother, Elvira Cordero Anguiano, was Mexican-American. She had six brothers and no sisters, and often described her brothers as six additional fathers. The family spent summers in Mexico and often moved from neighborhood to neighborhood in Chicago. (Martinez, Miriam, “A Latina of many colors, Sandra Cisneros.”)

Cisneros loved going to the library as a child because, she has said, she loved books, and she loved the quiet of the library as opposed to the rowdy atmosphere at home caused by fighting brothers and a television that played incessantly. She was an introverted, sensitive child who felt things deeply, moved from house to house throughout her childhood, and suffered through an oppressive Catholic school in Chicago but still found things such as a flower to “experience deeply.” (Martinez, Mariam).

Later Cisneros graduated from Loyola University in Chicago (1976) and was accepted into the prestigious Iowa University Writers Workshop from which she received an MFA (1978). She recounts the time in the Workshop when students discussed “the archetypical idea of the house.” Many students elaborately described all kinds of spaces in different homes, many of which made no sense to Cisneros, as one who had “lived in gritty places in Chicago.” At first, she felt insecure but then realized she had known many things and places her classmates had not and could not write about. Later, this classroom experience resulted in the book A House on Mango Street (Martinez, Mariam), launching her highly successful and critically acclaimed literary career.

In 1984, Cisneros moved to San Antonio, Texas, where she did a stint as Writer-in-Residence at Our Lady of the Lake University, having previously taught writing at other universities. She was to live in San Antonio until 2013 before moving to San Miguel de Allende, a city in Central Mexico where she still resides.

During her years in San Antonio, Cisneros not only wrote but also founded the Macondo Foundation for Writers and the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation, a foundation that provided grants and otherwise served Texas writers. Cisneros has produced an impressive body of work, much of it written while living in San Antonio. Her awards and honors have been numerous and include a National Book Award, a PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction, notable book of the year designations for several of her works from several top journals and newspapers, a PEN Center USA Literary Award for creative nonfiction, A MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Texas Institute of Letters Dobie-Paisabo Fellowship, two National Endowments for the Arts in Literature Fellowships in poetry and prose, the Texas Medal of the Arts, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation, and many other awards and honors from various universities and literary organizations.

For a list of her novels, short stories, books of poetry, and creative nonfiction, including brief summaries of each, go to Sandra Cisneros’ website at http://www.sandracisneros.com. It is a website well-worth visiting. By the way, A House On Mango Street has sold to date over 6 million copies.

Works Cited/Bibliography

Cisneros, Lunsford, Anastasia. “Archives define Texas author’s life, career.” https://hill views.test.edu/issues/2017/ramping-up-research/Sandra-Cisneros-works-find-home.html

Martinez,Miriam. “A Latina of many colors, Sandra Cisneros.” Latino Leaders, vol. 5, no. 2, Apr.-May 2004, pp. 42+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A116140972/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1df03315. Accessed 26 June 2023.

Vine, Katy. “SANDRA CISNEROS: THE MYTH BUSTER.” Texas Monthly, vol. 47, no. 12, Dec. 2019, pp. 82+ Gale General One File, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A608614311/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=802c1d8f. Accessed 26 June 2023.

Website: Sandra Cisneros, About my life and work.https://www.sandracisneros.com/mylifeandwork

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AUTHOR VISIT FOR ELEMENTARY CLASS AT READING RABBIT BOOK SHOP

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Signing, discussion, and Q & A with class of students who read Ranch Girl and the Orphan Lamb Adventure.

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Literary Texas: John Graves

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 prose stylists.” (Schwartz, John. New York Times).

If not for my husband–loyal fan, avid reader, and distant relative of John Graves, I doubt I would ever have read him, and that would have been a great loss. Often, when I read Graves, I sit again with my father and his generation of family farmers and ranchers–men whose mores rose from the land that challenged and sometimes taunted them. They were men (and women, too) whose calling was to physical work, animal husbandry, and natural conservation. Most were dedicated to family and to the spiritual command to love thy neighbor–even when a few of those “neighbors” might not be so lovable. They raised large gardens so they could “divide” the abundance with friends, kin, and kith. They turned up at neighbors’ gates when calves were coming breech. They savored nights of fishing on the river, grandparents on the homeplace, and a shade close to the watermelon patch on an August afternoon. That was quite a generation–as was, also, the one before them.

John Graves was a writer of the down-to-earth and of the lyrical, of the commonplace and of the extraordinary, and to those of us familiar with the terrain, he rarely missed a beat. Graves was born in Ft. Worth, Texas, on August 06, 1920. He grew up there and on his grandfather’s ranch near the South Texas town of Cuero. He graduated from Rice University in 1942 and fought as a Marine in the South Pacific during World War II, losing an eye at the behest of a grenade. After the war, he went to Columbia University and received a Master’s in English. For a while he taught at the University of Texas.

For some years in the 1950’s, Graves lived in such places as Spain (he was an admirer of Hemingway’s writings), France, Mexico, Sag Harbor, and New York. He published articles and literary fiction in such magazines as Holiday, Town and Country, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. He also wrote a novel that was never published.

In 1957, Graves went back to Texas to take care of his ill father. He did not intend to stay, but became a part of the English faculty at Texas Christian University; in 1958, married Jane Cole, originally from New York but now working for Neiman Marcus in Dallas; and later bought a nearly four-hundred-acre ranch near Glen Rose, Texas, (just south of Ft. Worth). He was never to move away from Texas again. His writing took a different direction.

Meantime, in 1957, having heard there were plans afield to turn the Brazos River area between Possum Kingdom Dam and Lake Whitney into several small lakes, Graves wanted to take the more than 170-mile trip down the Brazos River to say goodbye. So, he, canoe, and the six-month-old dachshund he referred to as “the passenger” took off. The resulting narrative of this journey became Goodbye to a River, his acclaimed “classic.” Throughout his lifetime, Graves continued to contribute numerous articles to such magazines as Holiday, Texas Parks and Wildlife, The Atlantic Monthly, and Texas Monthly, among others. His three most famous books are Goodbye to a River, Hardscrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land, and From a Limestone Ledge. He won many awards and accolades including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1962 Carr P. Collins award for Nonfiction from the Texas Institute of Letters for both Goodbye to a River and Hardscrabbleand was a finalist for the 1961 National Book Award for Nonfiction for Goodbye to a River and was nominated for the 1981 National Book Award for Nonfiction for From a Limestone Ledge, among many other honors.

John and Jane Graves raised two daughters on their ranch John named Hardscrabble. He built their unusual, rambling house himself, and spent considerable time working on the place. Sometimes he regretted giving up fiction and wondered how much more writing he would have accomplished had he not spent so much time on ranch work. Still, he was philosophical. That was how it was. His writings are filled with thought and ponderings, deep and poetic. Once asked in his old age if he would ever leave Hardscrabble, he said Jane did not want to, so he supposed they wouldn’t. Even a New York City girl whose mother owned a smart, New York City boutique and who herself became a designer for Neiman Marcus, can learn to love a land and a place and a home.

John Graves died on July 31, 2013, at Hardscrabble, his home. He was 92.

Work Cited

Schwartz, John. John Graves, Author Beloved by Fellow Texans, Dies at 92. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/books/john-graves-lauded-author

Bibliography

Cartwright, Gary. “Writing Life: John Graves might have published more books if he hadn’t spent so much time carpentering and raising goats. But the bard of Glen Rose’s legacy is written in stones as well as words.” Texas Monthly, vol. 38, no. 8, Aug. 2010, pp. 116+. Gale General OneFile,link.gale.com/apps/doc/A233607692/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2c1d83ca. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.

Curtis, Gregory. “The uncertain sage.” Texas Monthly, vol.22, no. 3, Mar. 1994, pp. 5+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A14895424?ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cb04531d. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.

Marshall, Noah F., Jr. “Graves, John Alexander III,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed March 20, 2023, https://www.tshaonline.or/handbook/entries/graves-john-alexander-iii.

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Literary Texas: John Graves, Part 2

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

“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 including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Book Award nominations. Graves often said he wrote about what interested him. It turned out that rivers and fences and bees and carpentry and goats and chickens and self-sufficiency and folk lore and family and his ranch were only a few of his numerous interests. Born in Ft. Worth, Texas, and educated at Rice and Columbia Universities, he led at first a writer’s life creating well-received literary short fiction, much of that life abroad until he came back to Texas because of an ailing father.

Although brought up in town, as a child and young man he spent considerable time on his grandfather’s South Texas ranch. So, the transition to Hard Scrabble was not as difficult for him as one might have thought. Even his New York City-bred, Neiman Marcus designer wife seems to have taken life on a remote, limestone ledge in stride. They lived near Glen Rose, Texas, in Somervell County.

A non-assuming gate that might or might not lead to Hard Scrabble. If this is not the gate, it is nearby.

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Literary Texas: Katherine Anne Porter

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 accommodating more than the occasional pick-up truck, where a ranch home dots the countryside here and there, and where cattle graze behind barbed wire fences in rocky pastures. Katherine Anne Porter’s own story is, indeed, as long and twisting as the country roads in Texas and as achingly poignant as the acclaimed stories she herself wrote.

Indian Creek, Texas, almost a ghost town now and hardly a thriving township in the best of times, is the birthplace of writer Katherine Anne Porter, born Callie Russell Porter (May 15, 1890). Celebrated as the author of critically acclaimed short stories, novels, and essays as well as other writings, Porter was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships in the 1930s and won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for her The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, published the year before. During the 1960s, she was nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Porter’s early life was fraught with tragedy. Her mother Mary Alice Jones Porter died when Callie was almost two years old. Unable to cope, her father Harrison Boone Porter moved with all four of his children to Kyle, Texas, to his mother’s home. Having given the children nine years of a stern but loving upbringing, Callie’s beloved grandmother died. From that point on the family lived in various places in Texas and Louisiana, sometimes with family, sometimes alone. When Callie was sixteen, she married, but divorced three years later, in the process legally changing her name to Katherine Anne Porter in honor of her grandmother. She was to marry four more times during her lifetime, none of the marriages long successful.

Although interested in writing as a child—in later years telling an interviewer with The Paris Review she had at age thirteen read and memorized Shakespearean sonnets and had been an avid reader (Davis, An Interview)—Porter began professionally writing, largely on newspapers in Chicago, Ft. Worth, and later for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. Darlene Harbour Unrue discusses in her essay titled “A newly discovered children’s story by Katherine Anne Porter: foretelling the mature canon” why Porter did not want to admit the full extent of her newspaper experience and concede its importance to her writing preparation because she had asserted “that she had published no fiction prior to the appearance of her story ‘Maria Concepcion’ in 1922 because she refused to allow any of her stories or novels to appear in print unless they met her exacting standard”(The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 62, Issue 1-2). In fact, Unrue believes Porter did not want to admit she had published children’s stories in Texas newspapers during her 1916 and 1917 hospitalization for tuberculosis in Texas sanitoria and ruin her assertion that all her writing preparation had been otherwise. (Ibid.)

By 1919, Porter was living in Greenwich Village, New York writing in whatever capacity she could to include writing advertising for movies and retelling fairytales for children. From New York, she went to Mexico for a while before returning. For some time, she moved between Mexico and New York, publishing “Maria Concepcion” in 1922. In 1930, she published her first collection of short stories, Flowering Judas, a book containing seven short stories. This collection drew significant literary acclaim and gave her a solid place in the literary world. Porter continued traveling, living and working in various places. In the years that followed, Katherine Anne Porter’s literary reputation continued to grow. “’This thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had—stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I’ve ever done,’ she told the Paris Review about her work.” (as qtd. in La Grassa, Jennifer, “Katherine Anne Porter is born.”) Some of her other most important works are as follows:

Katherine Anne Porter’s French Song book 1933
Flowering Judas and Other Stories (reissued collection that added four additional stories) 1935
Hacienda (short novel) 1934
Noon Wine (short novel) 1937
Pale Horse, Pale Rider (collection of three short novels) 1939
Leaning Tower and Other Stories 1944
The Days Before (collection of essays) 1952
The Old Order (collection of short stories) 1955
Ship of Fools (Novel) 1962
The Collected Short Stories of Katherine Anne Porter 1964
The Collected Essays and Occasional Writing of Katherine Anne Porter 1970
The Never-Ending Wrong, nonfiction book concerning the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti 1977

Many of Porter’s literary works reflect her Texas background and culture. This is true in particular of the three short novels collected in Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The setting of “Noon Wine” is “a small south Texas farm from 1896 to 1905,” that “actually takes place on the farm near Kyle where Porter grew up. Mountain City and Buda are mentioned specifically….”. (“Beyond the Pale,” 28.)

Katherine Anne Porter returned to Texas many times. She often taught, lectured, or served as writer-in-residence at colleges and universities across the United States. Late in the 1950s, she delivered a lecture at the University of Texas and discussed the possibility of having her literary papers housed there, but misunderstandings abounded, and that proposition fell through. Then, in 1976 Howard Payne University in Brownwood, TX, honored her with a literary symposium. (Graham, Don 79) It is said that while she was there, she revisited nearby Indian Creek and her mother’s grave at Indian Creek Cemetery and decided at that time she would be buried beside her mother. When Katherine Anne died on September 18, 1980, in Silver Spring, Maryland, her ashes were placed in a wooden coffin and were laid to rest beside her mother’s solitary grave. She was home at last.

Works Cited and Bibliography

“Beyond the Pale.” Texas Monthly, vol. 27, no.8, Aug. 1999, p.28. Gale General OneFile,

link.gale.com/apps/doc/A553160/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=79506f89. Accessed 5 Jan. 2023.

Davis, Barbara Thompson. “Katherine Anne Porter, The Art of Fiction.” Paris Review 29 (Winter-Spring 1963) https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4569/the-art-of-fiction-no-29-katherine-anne-porter>

Graham, Don. “Katherine the great.” Texas Monthly, vol. 25, no. 5, May 1997, pp. 76+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19381828/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid+bookmark-ITOF&xid+81d623c4. Accessed 5 Jan. 2023

“KATHERINE ANNE PORTER TIMELINE.” Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Maryland. <https://exhibitions.lib.umd.edu/contents/assets/exhibits/kaporter/katherine-anne-porter-timeline.pdf.>

La Grassa, Jennifer. “KATHERINE ANNE PORTER IS BORN.” Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada), 15 May 2018, p. A2 Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A538860121/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3766a3f5. Accessed 5 Jan. 2023.

Porter, Katherine Anne (1890-1980).” Encyclopedia of World Biography, Gale.1998. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A148471500/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=503f639c. Accessed 5 Jan. 2023.

Unrue, Darlene Harbour. “A newly discovered children’s story by Katherine Anne Porter: foretelling the mature canon.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 62, no. 1-2, winter-spring 2009, pp. 181+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A221093415/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0ea6acfb. Accessed 5 Jan. 2023.

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Literary Texas: Katherine Anne Porter, Part 2

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 expression most often referring to an accomplished author of serious literature, adored T.S. Eliot’s work and adopted her epitaph from the last line of his poem “East Coker.” It is also said to be the phrase Mary, Queen of Scotts embroidered prior to her execution in 1587, a phrase worth contemplating.

After successes as an author, Porter sometimes discussed her early love of reading and writing. Hers had been a literate family, surrounded by books and Shakespeare’s sonnets, her father once having challenged her to read his personal set of Voltaire’s philosophical dictionary, quite a feat for a young girl. She accepted but claimed it took her five years to complete. As a child ensconced in her grandmother’s house after her own mother’s death, Porter remembered a stern, loving, and genteel existence in Kyle, Texas, a small town near Austin, Southern in style and culture. (Davis, “Katherine Anne Porter, The Art of Fiction). She remembered, too, as the years went by, the racial prejudices of her time and place, which may account in part for her flirtation with communism during her Mexico years.

Porter spent much of her adult life away from Texas but apparently could not completely resist its allure, that dust and grit in the blood most Texans understand, that answer to the siren’s call that sometimes dashed her through waves against the rocks of a forbidding sea. Finally, she came to rest in an austere, little graveyard named Indian Creek Cemetery, a few miles from where she was born. She had come full circle, ending where she had begun.

A Pictorial

Katherine Anne Porter’s grave lies next to her mother’s in Indian Creek Cemetery, not far from where she was born.

Work Cited:

Davis, Barbara Thompson. “Katherine Anne Porter, The Art of Fiction.” Paris Review 29

(Winter-Spring 1963).<https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4569/the -art-of-

fiction-no-29-katherine-anne-porter>

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Literary Texas: Fred Gipson

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 any young birds that happened to fall out of nests. ” Frank Gipson. Old Yeller

Gipson set his most famous book Old Yeller in the wildly beautiful Texas Hill Country soon after the American Civil War. It opens as the men of a Hill Country settlement commence on a cattle drive to Abilene, Kansas, leaving mostly women and children to fend for themselves. It was a time when most often young teenage boys became men, and teenage girls and women developed an unremitting strength. On the frontier, peril loomed behind every rock, the unknown along every stream.

Essentially, this is the story of fourteen-year-old Travis, the older son of the Coates family, though the old cur stray Yeller has a strong supporting role and is a character few who have read the book or seen the movie will ever forget. Its creator grew up on a farm outside of Mason, Texas, deep within this Hill Country and as a boy, learned every creek, riverbank, hill, stone, overhang, and pool of water in the region. Many of his stories are set in these environs, providing a firm sense of place from which the action develops.

Fredrick Benjamin Gipson was born on February 7, 1908, to Beck and Emma Deishler Gipson. He graduated from Mason High School in 1926, worked a few years at farming, ranching, and other odd jobs before starting to The University of Texas in 1936. At the University, Gipson worked on The Daily Texan, the school’s official newspaper and on The Texas Ranger, a humor magazine. He left the school, however, to go to work for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times for a while before moving on to San Angelo to work on the San Angelo Standard-Times.

In San Angelo, he met and married Tommie Wynn with whom he later had two sons. While working at the Standard-Times and other newspapers, he began writing articles and short stories and selling them to magazines. He published at first in pulp Western magazines as well as more major slick magazines such as Look, Colliers, and Liberty. Later he published in the Southwest Review, a prestigious literary journal housed at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Gipson’s first published book was The Fabulous Empire: Colonel Zack Miller’s Story in 1946.

But it was Hound-Dog Man, published in 1949, that sold over 250,000 copies that brought him acceptance into the literary world. Although he published over twelve novels, he always considered Old Yeller to be his best. In a November 2000 article, Texas Monthly called Old Yeller ” a rite of passage for American children and went on to say, “a true measure of Old Yeller‘s importance is its universal familiarity.” The resulting 1957 Disney movie for which Gipson wrote the script was released on Christmas Day in San Angelo, Texas. The 1963 movie of Old Yeller‘s sequel, Savage Sam, premiered in Mason, Texas, at the Odeon Theater.

During his career, Gipson wrote hundreds of short stories, twelve books, a number of screen plays, and received numerous awards, including a 1957 Newbery Honor and the William Allen White Children’s Book Award in 1959, both for Old Yeller. In 1960, he became president of the Texas Institute of Letters. Following is a list of his published books, including revisions and republications:

Fabulous Empire: Colonel Zack Miller’s Story. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

Hound-Dog Man. New York: Harper, 1949. (Many critics consider this his best work.)

Circle Round the Wagons. London: Michael Joseph. 1949. UK edition of Hound-Dog Man.

The Home Place. New York: Harper, 1950.

Big Bend: A Homesteader’s Story (with J.O. Langford). Austin: University of Texas Press, 1952.

Cowhand: the story of a working cowboy. New York: Harper. 1953.

The Trail-Driving Rooster. New York: Harper, 1955.

Recollection Creek. New York: Harper, 1955.

Old Yeller. New York: Harper, 1956.

The “Cow Killers” : (with the Aftosa Commission in Mexico). Austin: University of Texas Press, 1956.

Recollection Creek, revised for young people. New York: Harper, 1959.

Savage Sam. New York: Harper, 1962.

Little Arliss. New York: Harper, 1978. (Published posthumously.)

Curly and the Wild Boar. New York: Harper, 1979. (Published posthumously.)

Hound-Dog Man. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.

In his later years, Gipson became an alcoholic who was said to be given to rages. Tragically, his older son committed suicide in 1962 at the age of 22, and Gipson and his wife Tommie divorced in 1964. He married Angelina Torres in 1967, but the marriage ended in divorce less than a year later. On August 17, 1973, Gipson died of a brain hemorrhage. He was 65. By proclamation of Govenor Dolph Briscoe, he was buried in the Texas State Cemetery. Inscribed on his tombstone is “His books are his monument.” His papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

…things like that happen. They may seem mighty cruel and unfair, but that’s how life is part of the time. But that isn’t the only way life is. A part of the time, it’s mighty good. And a man can’t afford to waste all the good part, worrying about the bad parts. That makes it all bad.” Fred Gipson, Old Yeller

Bibliography

Lackey, Dee. “Mason’s Master Storyteller Fred Gipson Still Enchanting Readers.” <https://authenictexas.com/master-mason-storyteller-fred-gipson-still-enchanting-readers/>
“Frederick Benjamin Gipson,” Texas State Cemetery Memo.””Old Accessed online January 12, 2023.
Gipson, Fred. Old Yeller. Harper, 1956.
“Old Yeller, Gipson, Frederick Benjamin,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed January 12, 2023, <https://www.tshaonine.org/handbook/entries/gipson-frederick-benjamin. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.
“Old Yeller.” Texas Monthly, vol. 28, no11, Nov. 2000, p. 250. Gale General OneFile, linkl.gale.com/apps/doc/A67408551/ITOF?

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Literary Texas: Fred Gipson, Part 2

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Sat, 24 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The desk on which Fred Gipson worked as well as some of his office furnishings. Display is in the Mason County Beven Eckert Memorial Library.

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Literary Texas: Larry McMurtry

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 set in Houston to be quirky, tragic, and poignant—the relationships oddly loving but troubled. And, as an important aside—I may be the only adult Texan who hasn’t read Lonesome Dove or at least seen the miniseries. My motto has long been: “Too many books, too little time, not only a cliché but also a sad truth. However, having learned a great deal more about McMurtry and his work since researching this post, I have begun buying or borrowing and downloading several of his books. At a much later time, I may have more to say about them from a quite personal perspective.

All that McMurtry did in his eighty-four years allotted to him on this earth cannot be adequately addressed in this post. It would take several books (including the three memoirs he, in fact, wrote) to scratch the surface. But, nevertheless, I plunge on.

Larry McMurtry is a name well-known in most literary circles, to numerous moviegoers, and to the lovers of westerns and TV miniseries. He was a prolific writer, having written dozens of novels, teleplays, films, screen plays, TV miniseries, memoirs, and numerous other nonfiction books. Additionally, he created quite a reputation in the antiquarian and used book trade.

He was born on June 3, 1936, in Wichita Falls, Texas, but his hometown was Archer City. His parents, Hazel Ruth McIver McMurtry and William Jefferson McMurtry had a ranch outside the town, and it was there where Larry grew up and worked until heading for college. He has said that as a young child he had few books but that his family enjoyed telling stories and he loved to listen. After a time, a cousin of his gave him a box of books, and as he grew up he became a dedicated reader. This love of story sparked his interest in collecting books and in writing. He has said that like so many who love to read, he decided to try his hand at writing.

McMurtry graduated from Archer City High School in 1954. Although he had worked for his father as a ranch hand, he said he never wanted to be a rancher, realizing as his father did that the ability to entirely make one’s living in such work was dying. He believed that only those with a vast expanse of land could hope to do so much longer. He left home to attend Rice University in Houston for a year, going from there to complete his B.A. in English at the University of North Texas (North Texas Teacher’s College, at the time) in 1958 and then back again for a M.A. from Rice University in 1960. He also received a the Stegner Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. While there he studied with several other writers who would become well-known, particularly Ken Kesey, author of the critically acclaimed novels One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, both later adapted into films. McMurtry and Oregon-based Kesey had a lifelong friendship.

In 1961, McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By, was published. It later became the film Hud. His novel Leaving Cheyenne was published in 1963. Although he received a prestigious Guggenheim Scholarship in 1964 based on his first novel, it was The Last Picture Show published in 1966 that gained him great notoriety. During the writing of these first novels, he had been teaching at Texas Christian University (1961-1962) and Rice University (1963-1969). Early on, his writings took on themes of loneliness and isolation, and later in such novels as Lonesome Dove, set in the cattle driving years soon after the Civil War, sought to demythologize the old west. From such early and highly acclaimed beginnings, he was to go on to even greater successes with such books and films as Duane’s Depressed and Desert Rose (favorites of McMurtry), All my Friends are Going to be Strangers, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove, Streets of Laredo, Brokeback Mountain (film adaptation), Crazy Horse: A Life, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond, Paradise, and numerous others, some of which were later collaborations with his close friend Diana Ossana, whom he met in the 1980s in Tucson, Arizona, where he had one of his homes.

When in 1991, he suffered a heart attack and had to have bypass surgery, his friend Diana took him in to her own home to nurse him back to health. During this time, McMurtry became deeply depressed, and it was she who eventually brought him out of the depression and helped him get back into his old writing routine. She, not known previously as a writer, began to collaborate on several writing projects, particularly screenplay and teleplay adaptations of his and others’ work. Their adaptation of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountainwas one of their major successes.

Awards and Honors (Not all)

Wallace Stegner Fellowship

Guggenheim Fellowship

Academy Awards, Last Picture Show

Academy Awards, Terms of Endearment

Pulitzer Prize, Lonesome Dove

Emmys, Lonesome Dove

Golden Globes, Brokeback Mountain (co-winner with Diana Ossana)

Academy Award. Brokeback Mountain (co-winner with Diana Ossana)

National Humanities Medal 2014

Numerous awards from the Texas Institute of Letters

Amon G. Carter award for periodical prose

Peggy V. Helmerich distinguished Author Award from the Tulsa Library Trust

…and, no doubt, numerous more.

Personal

Larry McMurtry was married twice. He first married Jo Scott in 1959. They had a son together, James McMurtry. He has one son, Curtis McMurtry. Jo Scott is an English professor who has written five books herself. They divorced in 1966. In 2011, he married Ken Kesey’s widow Norma Faye Kesey, who survived him, as did his son and grandson. McMurtry died on March 25, 2021. Also surviving were two sisters and a brother, his close friend and continuing film-writing collaborator Diana Ossana, and her daughter, McMurtry’s goddaughter, Sara Ossana.

Home of Larry McMurtry in Archer City where he came back to live.

Bibliography

Dunlap, Robert J. “McMurtry, Larry Jeff (1936 – 2021). TSHA, Texas State Historical Association. tshaonline.org. Accessed 24 Feb. 2023.

Jones, Malcolm. “The Poet Lariat.” Newsweek, no.2, 11 Jan. 1999, p. 62. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A53545889/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=41ck125e. Accessed 22 Feb. 2023.

“Larry McMurtry, author of ‘Lonesome Dove’ and other novels, dies at age 84.” CNN Wire, 27 Mar. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile,link.gale.com/apps/doc?A656421723/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2bfde6ee. Accessed 22 Feb. 2023.

“Larry McMurtry; Chronicler of the West noted for books and films including Lonesome Dove and Brokeback Mountain.” Daily Telegraph [London, England], 30 Mar. 2021, p.27. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A656734830/ITOF/u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF7xid=525e8c36. Accessed 22 Feb. 2023.

“McMurtry, Larry.” Encyclopedia of World Biography, edited by James Craddock, 2nd. ed., vol. 34, Gale, 2014, pp. 259-261. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3788300124/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF*xid=618d5249. Accessed 22 Feb. 2023.

“McMurtry’s ‘Literary Life’: Not Simple, But Practical.” Morning Edition, 23 Dec. 2009. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A215066421/ITOF&u;txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d3chaO**. Accessed 22 Feb. 2023.

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Literary Texas: Larry Mc Murthy, Part 2

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 University and Rice University. He left to teach at George Mason University in Virginia and from there on to American University in Washington D.C. While living in Washington D.C., he opened a bookstore he called Booked Up, another in Phoenix, Arizona, and still later, moved his Booked Up empire to his hometown of Archer City, Texas. His stores sold used, rare, and antiquarian books.

McMurtry was to become nearly as well-known as a bookseller as he was as a writer. In Archer City the store became the largest used bookstore in Texas and one of the largest in the United States. It took up six buildings and sported over a half million books.

So it was that the celebrated author of more than thirty novels, a dozen or so nonfiction books, numerous screenplays, and many teleplays often seemed as happy with his book business as with his other work. By the late 80s, he had bought a large, old mansion in Archer City, and lived much of his life there with his writing and loved ones near his beloved Booked Up. By the 2,000s, the Pulitzer Prize winner spent considerable time working in and on his huge book business.

In 2012, however, with his health failing, McMurtry decided to sell off a vast number of his books. He had an auction in Archer City, worried that his books would be a burden to his heirs. The sell was a great success, even though he kept around 30,000 books for his personal use and kept many more in some of his buildings.

Larry McMurtry died in March of 2021. Then in December of 2022, Chip Gaines was sighted on the streets of Archer City. According to Amanda O’Donnel’s article in Texas Monthly titled “Chip Gaines Bought Larry McMurtry’s Historic Texas Bookstore. Bring on the Shiplap?”, the Fixer Upper star has bought Booked Up. The article reveals that both Chip Gaines’ parents and grandparents were from Archer City. It may seem fitting to many that another well-known Texan with familial connections to Archer City has bought the bookstore and that its possible reopening is the talk around town.

Various scenes from Archer City, Texas, where Larry McMurtry grew up and returned to live after becoming a critically acclaimed writer. The city sign; The Royal (Last Picture Show); pictures of his beloved Booked Up; Anarene, a ghost town that was the name of the town in Last Picture Show; and a picture of a street in Archer City.

Bibliography

Dunlap, Robert J. “McMurtry, Larry Jeff (1936 – 2021). TSHA, Texas State Historical Association. tshaonline.org. Accessed 24 Feb. 2023.

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Literary Texas: Dorothy Scarborough, Part 2

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 an impression. The ranching area with its constant winds, periodic dust storms, and hardships became the setting of The Wind, the novel that became a silent movie, starring Lilian Gist.

Emily Dorothy Scarborough, who graduated from Baylor University and became a professor there, having also attended Oxford (degrees were not conferred on women) and completed her Ph.d from Columbia University where she taught creative writing, became a renowned academic, author, folklorist, poet, and science fiction critic. It is her relation to science fiction that we will consider in this post.

Science Fiction had become a popular genre in Scarborough’s time though it did not often get respect among the academic community, but Dorothy found it an interesting subject, having chosen to write her dissertation on it. In fact, Gary Westfahl—writer, reviewer, and science fiction scholar called her “the first academic critic of science fiction.” In his 1999 article “On the Trail of a Pioneer: Dorothy Scarborough, The First Academic Critic of Science Fiction,” he says that Scarborough became interested in science fiction, which she called scientific supernaturalism, in her capacity as a folklorist and was most interested in its short story form. The science fiction short story had become an entertainment force for the middle class by the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dorothy’s dissertation titled The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction was published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1917. The book divided science fiction into such areas as romances, ghost stories, Devil stories, wizard stories, vampires stories, and supernatural folktales. Scarborough believed the fact of scientific supernaturalism’s popularity made it deserving of examination (Westfahl, Gary, 292).

Although as a writer, Dorothy was mainly a novelist, she edited and compiled two volumes of ghost stories and a volume of short stories, authored a collection of poetry, wrote short stories and poetry for journals and magazines, wrote book reviews, critical essays, and folklore articles, and was on the staff of the New York Sun.

Works Cited:

Westfahl, Gary. “On the Trail of a Pioneer: Dorothy Scarborough, the First Academic Critic of Science Fiction.” Extrapolation, vol. 40, no. 4, winter 1999, p. W92. Gale General One File, link. Gale.com/apps/doc/A601357/ITOF?u=txshrpub100443&sid=bookmark-ITUF&xid=70d46ef3. Accessed 19 Aug 2024

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Literary Texas: Dorothy Scarborough

Brenda Ethridge Ferguson — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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 reasons for those--sorry, I digress.

When I began The Wind, I knew nothing about Scarborough but had heard a bit here and there about the book. For one thing, a Hollywood studio bought the movie rights, Dorothy and her brother George did the film adaptation, and the famous star of the silent screen, Lilian Gish, played Letty Mason, the book's protagonist. Not too shabby! Before I go any further with The Wind, however, I want to introduce, those of you not already familiar, to Emily Dorothy Scarborough, a most remarkable woman.

Dorothy, or Dottie as she was called by family and close friends, was born on January 27, 1878, in Mount Carmel, Texas, a small East Texas town in Smith County near Tyler. Her father, a confederate veteran originally from Louisiana, was an East Texas lawyer--John Bledsoe Scarborough. Her mother was Mary Adelaide (Ellison) Scarborough. Dorothy had three siblings, but the oldest child, Elison Bledsoe, died young. All three of the remaining children were to become quite accomplished and all three had literary inclinations. Martha Douglass, her sister, studied Modern Languages at Vassar; taught at Baylor University; married George White McDaniel, who pastored First Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, for over 20 years; and wrote three novels, a volume of poetry, and a biography of her husband. Her brother, George Moore, graduated from the University of Texas Law School, served with the U.S. Department of Justice, and wrote plays performed on Broadway. His play The Lure was a Broadway sensation.

In 1882, Dorothy's family moved to Sweetwater, Texas, for her mother's health. After living there for five years, they moved to Waco, Texas, in 1887 so the children could attend Baylor University. Dorothy's father, now Judge Scarborough, served as a member of the Baylor Board of Trustees from 1888 until his death in 1905. Here in Waco, Dorothy began her academic career.

Dorothy graduated from Baylor University with a B.A. in 1896 and an M.A. in 1899, all the while teaching at Baylor as a graduate student. Both degrees were in English. In 1905, she became a regular faculty member at Baylor (1905-1915). Dorothy, a staunch Baptist, also taught a college men's Sunday School class at the First Baptist Church in Waco and began working on her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago during the summers of 1906 to 1910, taking off to study at Oxford University during the 1910-1911 school year, even though Oxford did not confer degrees on women. She finished her Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1917 and in 1918 was hired by Columbia to teach creative writing, as well as The Development of the English Novel and The History of the English Language.

Scarborough's publishing career was impressive. In 1912, she published a volume of poetry called Fugitive Verses. Her doctoral dissertation The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction was published as a monograph in 1917, From a Southern Porch in 1919, Humorous Ghost Stories in 1921 (Editor), Famous Modern Ghost Stories in 1921 (Editor), In the Land of Cotton, in 1913, The Wind in 1925, The Unfair Sex as a serial in 1925-1926, Impatient Griselda in 1927, Can't Get a Redbird in 1929, The Stretch-Berry Smile in 1932, and The Story of Cotton (children's) in 1933. Finally, in 1935 she compiled and edited the literary collection The Collected Short Stories of Today which was published posthumously. Additionally, she published poems in magazines and journals, and published book reviews, short stories, critical essays and articles on folklore and was on the staff of the New York Sun.

Dorothy was largely a novelist "whose works dealt primarily with the plight and role of women in Texas and elsewhere." (Sylvia Grider, "Scarborough, Emily Dorothy") and that brings us back to The Wind which was published by Harper and Brothers, New York City. It was set on a ranch near Sweetwater, Texas, and caused an uproar because of its depiction of the harsh West Texas environment and its effect on a young woman who comes there to live. In a nutshell, it begins when the eighteen-year-old, genteel Letty Mason comes from Virginia to West Texas to live with her cousin after her parents die. Her cousin's wife, who is none too welcoming and a bit jealous, pressures Letty into a loveless marriage (on Letty's side) to one of the two young ranchers who come calling. Living conditions on her husband's ranch are bleak. Letty does her best to adapt and be a good wife but having been sheltered and raised with wealth in Virginia, she is a bit of a hot house plant compared to her cousin's wife who is older, rugged, and strong-willed. The main terror of Letty's life is the wind that never seems to stop and becomes anthropomorphized in her mind. The wind shatters Letty's nerves. Complications mount in the form of a man she thinks she may love, a long and relentless drought, dead cattle, and the wind, the wind, the wind. Of course, I am simplifying the plot, characters, and theme with all their psychological implications and the shocking nature of the ending, especially for its time. When I have time, I want to think more deeply about the story.

I hope to write a Part 2 blog on Dorothy Scarborough. I find her and what I have read of her writing fascinating. For you speculative fiction fans out there, I'll try to discuss then the idea that Dorothy may be the first academic critic of science fiction, which she referred to as scientific supernaturalism, her penchant for folklore and folksongs, and her interest in ghost stories.

Works Cited:

Sylvia Grider, "Scarborough, Emily Dorothy," Handbook of Texas Online, accessed August 19, 20024, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/scarborough-emily-dorothy. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

Bibliography

Dorothy Scarborough: Early journalism prof, trailblazing author, and Baylor Bear, posted in Alumni Extraordinary Stories, History. March 18, 2022

Dorothy Scarborough papers, Accession #153, The Texas Collection, Baylor University, Described by Casey Schumacher; Benna Vaughan; Perry Harrison, and released on 2015-03-27. Accessed 2024-08-19

"I Have Books I Must Write--Dorothy Scarborough." Women in Texas: their lives, their experiences, their accomplishments. Crawford and Ragsdale--Eakin Press--1982.

Scarborough, Dorothy. The Wind (reprint). Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1979.

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