A Guide to Literary East Texas by
Fred Tarpley Professor
Emeritus of English Texas
A&M University-Commerce Literary
East
Texas honors
the work of twenty-five authors, selected from more than two hundred
writers who have lived in and written about the eastern half of the
state. Passages from their works are illustrated by photographs taken
especially for this exhibition. Because
the advisory board had recommended specific passages for illustration,
the photographer and project director had images clearly in mind when
they set out to travel more than 4000 miles and take 1600 pictures. The
variety of East Texas fiction provided scenes from the Red River through
the Piney Woods to the Gulf Coast, of oil, cotton, and urban settings.
Often there was a disappointment of learning that a building used for
the setting of a novel had been razed, but occasionally a substitute
could be found that matched descriptions of the original. Sometimes the
travelers would come upon a scene right out of one of the novels without
having chosen a quotation in advance. In such instances, the photograph
was taken and the exact passage pinpointed later. The
goals of Literary East Texas are to encourage readers to discover and
rediscover writers of the region, to match the words of these authors
with photographs of the people and landscape they described, and to
honor representative writers of the region. J.
Mason Brewer J.
Mason Brewer collected more Negro folk tales than any other person and
was regarded as America’s foremost Black folklorist. He was born in
Goliad and educated for a teaching career that spanned fifty-eight years
in public schools and colleges. At the time of his death in 1975, he was
Distinguished Visiting Professor in English at East Texas State
University. He wrote eleven books of folklore and poetry. Among his collections of folk tales, The Word on the Brazos includes stories handed down by residents along the course of the Brazos River in East Texas, many of them with a religious motif. In Dog Ghosts Brewer isolated the dog-spirit tale that is not part of any American oral tradition except that of the Negro. Its prevalence among Negroes may be explained by the widespread African myth “that tells how the dog became a friend to man, helping him catch his food, showing him the cunning ways of the wild beasts, and demanding in return only a place by man’s hearth and bones from his meals.” In all of the dog spirit stories collected by Brewer in the Red River bottoms and elsewhere in Texas, the dog is a benign ghost, who appears only to help someone in distress. To collect tales in natural settings, Brewer often posed as an itinerant farm hand, picking two hundred pounds of cotton by day and listening to folk stories by night as he mingled with other workers. Siddie
Joe Johnson As
director of the children’s department of the Dallas Public Library,
Siddie Joe Johnson was active in every phase of the literary world of
her young charges. Her own literary experiences began with the writing
of rhymes, soon after the age of seven, when she moved to Corpus Christi
from Dallas, where she had been born. By age twelve she had a
composition book full of poems as a present for her mother, and in high
school her classmates were eager to read the stories she had written. In
1933, a year after she graduated from Texas Christian University, her
first book of poems was published. After teaching school for a time, she
returned to Corpus Christi to work in the public library, gradually
turning to children’s work while continuing to write poetry. In 1940, two years after she became head of the children’s department of the Dallas Public Library, her first children’s book, Debby, was published, based on her childhood. New Town in Texas followed, the story of a family of pioneer children in Denison in 1872 at the coming of the railroad. “The family was really my father’s family,” Miss Johnson wrote. A contemporary Dallas setting was chosen for Cat Hotel, the story of a woman on Gaston Avenue, who kept cats for vacationing families. A long series of books, many of them based on Texas history, made her name synonymous with Texas literature for young readers. Miss Johnson died in 1977. William
Goyen The
house that is the focal point of The
House of Breath no longer stands in Trinity, the model for Charity,
Texas, but townspeople can take visitors to the vacant lot where it
stood and recall memories of William Goyen, who was born there. From the
age of seven, he lived in Houston, where he received both B.A. and M.A.
degrees from Rice University and chose a career of writing over
composing, which he had once considered (and which brought the ASCAP
awards for musical composition in 1965, 1966, and 1968-1969). His
literary career has included novels, short stories, plays, and
non-fiction—all greeted with the acclaim that he is the most
“poetic” of Texas-born prose writers. He worked as an editor for
McGraw-Hill and taught at the New School for Social Research, Columbia,
Brown, and Princeton before settling in Los Angeles with his wife,
actress Doris Roberts. He died in 1983. Commenting on the influence of his hometown, Goyen wrote, “The world of that town, its countryside, its folk, its speech and superstition and fable, was stamped into my senses during those first seven years of my life; and I spent the first twelve years of my writing life reporting it and fabricating it into short fiction.” Laura
Krey Laura
Krey was born in Galveston but grew up on a family plantation in the
lower Brazos Valley, the setting of her first novel, And
Tell of Time, a tale of Texas during Reconstruction. A New
York Times reviewer in 1938 compared the novel favorably with Gone
with the Wind, calling it “a more thoughtful novel, with more
wisdom of life in it, and more pointed for the times in which we
live.” Next,
Mrs. Krey moved backward in time to treat the Texas revolution in a
historical romance entitled On
the Long Tide. Both novels were written while Mrs. Krey was living
in St. Paul, married to a professor of history at the University of
Minnesota, an influence that no doubt contributed to the historical
research universally praised by critics. Mrs. Krey lived in Austin
before her death in 1985. Speaking at the second annual meeting of the Texas Institute of Letters in 1938, Mrs. Krey outlined her criteria for judging Texas Books: “A book must have universality while being peculiarly Southern; must have characters drawn according to choices they make rather than the clothes they wear; must have a deep flavor of time and place.” William
Humphrey The
Clarksville town square with its Confederate statue and the Red River
County courthouse two blocks to the north are as central to the literary
career of William Humphrey as they are to the life of the Northeast
Texas town, population 3,909. Although Humphrey was uprooted from
Clarksville at age thirteen when his father died following a car
accident, the memories of those formative years have been vivid enough
to sustain two novels, a collection of short stories, and two volumes of
autobiographical non-fiction. His
first novel, Home from the Hill,
which became an MGM movie directed by Vincente Minnelli, contains a
Clarksville setting and autobiographical threads woven into fiction:
hunting in the Sulphur River bottom, initiation rites of a snipe hunt,
and cemetery cleaning day. Humphrey attended Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas, graduating from neither before going to New York in hopes of becoming a playwright. After a series of jobs as a porter in a boys’ camp and a goatherd, he started writing stories for Accent and Sewanee Review and teaching English at Bard College. Humphrey died in August 1997 at Hudson, New York. He made occasional visits to Clarksville, where he bought the last two plots in the old cemetery that appears so often in his writing. William
Owens Texas
folklore makes much of boys whose fathers die before they are born and
of children who are delivered with a caul over the face. Such offspring
are believed to have special powers. The special gifts of
folklorist-author-teacher William Owens should be two-fold since his
father died on the day Bill was born, and the midwife took note of the
caul over his face. As a child he was often called upon cure folks of
various ailments because he was born with the “power.” In his autobiographical work, This Stubborn Soil, Owens faithfully records his growing up in an impoverished farming area of Lamar County in the community of Pin Hook. His determination to enter college won over incredible odds of poverty and family duty. After teaching in several Texas colleges, he joined the English faculty of Columbia University and wrote novels about oil fields along the Gulf Coast, slave trade in the Caribbean, and farm life in Oklahoma before turning to his Texas boyhood for literary material for This Stubborn Soil, followed by a continuation of the autobiography, Season of Weathering Owens retired from teaching at Columbia and lived at Nyack, New York, until his death in 1990. Thomas
Thompson Thomas
Thompson wrote his non-fiction in such a novelistic style that readers
tend to think of Blood and Money,
Lost! and Serpentine
as works of fiction. His first novel—Three
Princes—came later, telling of a writer, an actor, and a preacher
who grew up in Texas, “a boyhood memoir,” as Thompson refers to it.
The Fort Worth-born writer’s father was a teacher and his mother a
high school principal. After graduating from the University of Texas, he
worked for the Houston Post as
a reporter and city editor before taking a position with Life,
first in New York and later in Paris. After 1972, he devoted himself to
his own writing projects, including TV and screen plays, articles, and
books that he considered an extension of the TV documentary. Houston’s
social, petroleum, and medical empires are blended in the setting of
Blood and Money, concerning the curious death of Houston
socialite/horse-woman Joan Robinson Hill, and the implications of her
oilman father, Ash Robinson, in the murder of her husband, Dr. John
Hill. Long after publication of the book, the drama continued in the
courtroom when Robinson, Dr. Hill’s second wife, and a Longview
policeman—all depicted by Thompson—filed lawsuits against him asking
for amounts totaling $25.5 million. He countersued Dr. Hill’s second
wife for $5.25 million. Thompson, who lived in Los Angeles until his
death in 1982, disciplined himself to produce ten or twelve pages per
day during a four-hour stretch at the typewriter, then to spend the
remaining work time doing research.
Leon
Hale Leon
Hale’s first book, Turn South
at the Second Bridge contained material from the first nine years of
his daily column for the Houston
Post, including a description of one of his favorite haunts, a
tavern in Glen Flora, west of Houston: “Around Scheller’s Place, it
doesn’t matter who you are. Your name doesn’t amount to any more
than the double blank on one of Ed’s battered boxes of dominoes. What
does matter is what you show yourself to be when you are sitting there
at one of Ed’s tables. What you were yesterday, or last month or ten
years ago—it just doesn’t matter.” In
Bonney’s Place, Hale
incorporated Scheller’s Place into a composite of taverns he has known
and loved. His plot has the narrator, John Lancaster, seeking revenge
because he thinks Bonham J. McCamey, owner of Bonney’s Place, stole
$1,500 from Lancaster’s dead father. As Lancaster discovers how much
the Regulars and the Occasionals depend upon Bonney for meaning in their
lives, he understands how much happiness his father must have derived
from Bonney during the last year of his life. He, too, becomes caught up
in the contagious, big-hearted life style of Bonney’s Place, where
folk are accepted for their individual worth. Hale wrote Bonney’s Place standing up during a time he had a nerve problem in his leg. He also writes sitting in his car, electric typewriter plugged into his cigarette lighter outlet as he travels about Texas finding material for his daily column. Stephenville is his place of birth, Eastland High School and Texas Tech are his alma maters, and Houston his home. George
Sessions Perry The
National Book Award in 1941 went to Hold
Autumn in Your Hand by twenty-five-year old George Sessions Perry,
who wrote of the life he knew well in his native Milam County. In his
fiction, Rockdale became Hackberry, the San Gabriel River became the San
Pedro, and family members became models for his characters. Perry’s
road to acclaim as a major American novelist was interrupted by his
service with the Air Force as a war correspondent in World War II. At
war’s end, he was one of the casualties—psychologically and
physically—describing himself as having been “defictionalized” by
what he and the world had experienced. He produced no more fiction
although he continued to hold an important place in American letters
with his journalistic and autobiographical writing. At age forty-six, in
December 1956, Perry walked in the East River near his home in Guilford,
Connecticut, and his nude body was recovered two months later lodged
against a bridge abutment. The coroner’s verdict was “accidental
death,” but details remain a mystery. Movie audiences know Hold Autumn in Your Hand as “The Southerner,” filmed in 1945 by Frenchman Jean Renoir and starring native Texan Zachary Scott, with Betty Field, Beulah Bondi, and J. Carroll Naish. The novel tells the story of a year in the life of a family of a cotton tenant farmer at the mercy of the whims of nature and of an unkind neighbor, surviving through perseverance and family loyalty. David
Westheimer Houston
was home for David Westheimer until 1960, when he moved to California.
After graduating from Rice University and studying creative writing and
radio writing at Columbia, he held several positions on the
Houston Post in charge of amusements, radio-television, and the
Sunday magazine. His first two novels, Summer
on the Water and The Magic
Fallacy, are set in Houston and on the Gulf Coast. Experiences in
World War II, in which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross,
provided the background for Von
Ryan’s Express, which became a movie starring Frank Sinatra. His
later work, including the novelization of the screenplay, “Days of
Wine and Roses,” has had a variety of themes and settings. In
Summer on the Water, Pine
Creek is actually Clear Creek, which empties into Galveston Bay south of
Houston. The foliage, the weather, and the sultry summer moods of the
area are described vividly as backdrop to the drama of the indignities
inflicted by a white family upon an admirable Black woman, who is driven
to a martyr’s death to end suffering caused by miscegenation in the
South. Karle
Wilson Baker Turning
from a distinguished career as a Texas poet, Karle Wilson Baker wrote
her first novel in 1937, a study of the social upheaval caused in the
life of a farm family when the East Texas oil field erupts on their
property. Fate creates millionaires one day and robs them of their
riches the next, forcing the heroine to serve family style meals when
her fortunes fail. Mrs. Baker, who was born in Little Rock, taught
English at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, where she
lived until her death in 1960. Her daughter, Charlotte Baker, of Nacogdoches is also a writer, having been honored by the Texas Institute of Letters. The photographs of the antique oil field equipment illustrating scenes from Family Style were taken near Batson. Ruth
Cross In
The Big Road and other
Texas-based novels, Ruth Cross writes of a locale called Laws’ Chapel,
a cotton farming community that is making the transition from wagon to
automobile. It is based on her childhood home in Sylvan, Lamar County.
Her father, a country doctor, moved his family to nearby Paris, where
Miss Cross graduated from high school in 1904. After attending the
University of Texas for a time, she left to begin a teaching career,
returning to complete a degree in 1911. She combined teaching and
writing in Texas and California, publishing The
Golden Cocoon as her first novel in 1924. She married G. W. Palmer, a landscape artist, and made her home in Winsted, Connecticut, continuing to use Texas as the setting of her fiction. The incorporation of recognizable citizens and events of Paris, Texas, into a novel, An Unknown Goddess, led to the banning of that book from the Paris city library and the removal of all traces of her work there. She died in Winnfield, Louisiana, in 1981. Francis
E. Abernethy As
secretary-editor of the Texas Folklore Society and professor of English
at Stephen F. Austin State University, Francis E. Abernethy has written
and edited a book shelf of Texas lore. In Tales
from the Big Thicket, he collects multifaceted views of that
mysterious national reserve in Southeast Texas, where legends and
history blend into a curious mythology set against exotic plant and
wildlife. At the northern edge of the Big Thicket is the reservation of
the Alabama-Coushatta Indians. Abernethy would have been a native-born Texan had his parents not found themselves victims of a boundary change between Texas and Oklahoma after they had settled on land that was then in far North Texas. As a result of the shifting of the state line, Abernethy must list his birthplace as Altus, Oklahoma, but no one is more Texan than the Nacogdoches folklorist. Apart from literary activities, Abernethy is a founder of the Texas Folklife Festival at the Institute of Texan Cultures in San Antonio and a member of the East Texas String Band. Sigman
Byrd Sigman
Byrd telescopes some one hundred and fifty square miles of authentic
Texas scenery into a small mythical East Texas community in The
Redlander, with the Tejas Indian mission at the western edge of
Redlands and the Big Thicket just to the south. He also makes sport of
Texas history with his creation of the Fraternal Rebellion, which gives
citizens of the Redlands an aristocratic claim if they can trace their
ancestry to the heroes of that event. When his hero goes to
Austin—first as a student and later as a senator—Byrd takes fewer
liberties with settings and events. Blanket, in Brown County, is Byrd’s birthplace, but he is identified with a writing career in Houston, where he was a newspaper columnist. A collection of his columns has been published as Sig Byrd’s Houston. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was a regular contributor of short stories to the Saturday Evening Post. A novel which preceded The Redlander was Tall Grew the Pines, also set in the Piney Woods of East Texas. Byrd died in Austin in December 1987. Suzanne
Morris Childhood
visits to Galveston had kindled Suzanne Morris’ interest in the
history and romance of the island city, but in 1972 at age twenty-eight,
she first approached the novel Galveston, not with history in mind, but
with the idea for a character who needed to be placed in an 1899
setting. Meticulous research required daily trips for the native
Houstonian to the Rosenberg Library in Galveston, where the Galveston
News (Texas’ oldest newspaper) was available on microfilm, as well
as a diary of an attorney who kept a daily journal of his personal and
business life. Two weeks before the birth of her son, Mrs. Morris had completed the manuscript for Galveston, spanning three generations, 1877–1920, and told from the point of view of three women. Although she gave fictitious addresses in the novel, she was describing homes known to her since childhood, buildings which are shown in this exhibit. The same kind of research that produced Galveston is to be found in Keeping Secrets, her second novel, set in San Antonio between 1914 and 1918. A third novel Skychild, has contemporary themes and settings in Houston and on Galveston Bay. Mrs. Morris lives in the Houston area. Madison
Cooper A
1900-vintage mansion known as “The Elliott Hotel” in Sironia,
Texas can be seen today in Waco, Texas at 1801 Austin Avenue, once
the home of Madison Cooper and now headquarters of the Cooper
Foundation, which received the bachelor’s estate of some $3 million
upon his death in 1956. In accordance with Cooper’s bequest, the
foundation is dedicated to improving the quality of life in Waco. A
native of Waco, Cooper inherited a fortune and his family’s wholesale
grocery business, free to enjoy a life of non-conformity and secret
literary pursuits. A
Columbia University correspondence course got him started as a writer in
the early 1930s, but his biographer believes it was a rejection note
from his agent in 1937 saying, “You make it so tame and so damn
drab” that made him determined to prove the agent wrong. Writing in an
attic room of the mansion, he first produced a story, “The Catch of
Sironia,” that won over hundreds of entries in an Antioch College
contest. In 1952 Waco was stunned to learn that the novel he had been
writing for eleven years would be published as a Houghton-Mifflin
Fellowship winner and as the longest novel ever printed by an American.
The two-volume, 850,000 word Sironia,
Texas reports life in a Texas town modeled after Waco from 1900 to
1921 and is the length of eight average novels. Before his death, a
second novel, The Haunted
Hacienda, was published. Barry
Benefield Like
Jean Paul Baptiste Yvonne Fippany of Chicken-Wagon
Family and Carrie Snyder of Valiant
is the Word for Carrie, Barry Benefield left Crebillon (Jefferson)
to seek his fortune in New York. After a brief stint at the Dallas
Morning News, he made his way to Manhattan to work as editor for
book publishers at the same time he wrote novels and short stories. In
1947, he and his wife retired to Jefferson, where he died in 1969. Although scenes he depicts in his fiction match the landscape of Jefferson, a former riverboat port near the Louisiana line, he calls his fictional town Crebillon, Louisiana. Some of his relatives in Jefferson recall that Benefield once explained his New York editors would not accept bayous, magnolias, and Old South culture as a part of Texas, requiring him to identify the setting as Louisiana. Other Jeffersonians believe that it was Benefield’s own idea to disguise the name of the town just as he had given new names to real people in their community when he used them as the basis for many of his characters. Three of Benefield’s novels were made into feature films. Ben
K. Green Ben
K. Green was born in 1912 in Cumby, Hopkins County, where a favorite and
influential relative was his uncle, Ben F. Green, a respected
veterinarian. When Ben K. was eleven, the family moved to Greenville for
three years and then to Weatherford. His absence from Weatherford High
School on the first Monday of each month was predictable because the
County Trades Day was always held on that date, and young Ben could not
resist the education to be found on the town square. An unsuccessful
campaign for a seat in the state legislature, a prison term in
Huntsville for “moving some mortgaged cattle,” and the opportunity
to treat prison animals preceded Green’s move to Fort Stockton in 1944
to establish a veterinary practice. His use of D.V.M. following his name
seems to be self-bestowed, but friends testify to his competence as a
veterinarian, and critics recognized him as a glorious storyteller. Green began his writing career as editor of the International Quarterhorse Tally Book from 1960 to 1962. He took some of his articles from this to publish Horse Conformation and Hoss Trades of Yesteryear in 1963. The publication of “Grey Mules” in The Southwest Review attracted the attention of the editor of Knopf in New York, which published a series of ten books by Green, establishing his national reputation. Green died in 1974 after having been elected to the Cowboy Hall of Fame. Garland
Roark Garland
Roark, a native of Groesbeck, began his career as a water-color artist
and shifted to advertising before succumbing to the urge to write in
1939. Operating under the rule of writing about what he knew, he decided
to write about one of his favorite water-color subjects, sailing ships.
The result was Wake of the Red
Witch, a Literary Guild selection and later a movie starring John
Wayne, who took the name of his own production company—Batjac—from
the name Roark used for a Dutch trading company in the book. More sea adventures followed—Fair Wind to Java, Rainbow in the Royals, and others—at the same time Roark began writing Western novels under the name of George Garland. In 1968, he turned to a Texas subject in Drill a Crooked Hole, the story of slant-well drilling in the East Texas Oil Field. Kilgore, Longview, and Overton are thinly veiled as Kilview and Longton, where the rise and fall of fortunes in the oil field are seen through the eyes of a Houston oil reporter. Roark made his home in Nacogdoches with his wife, whom he regarded as “the world’s greatest literary critic.” He died in 1985. Hermes
Nye No
better chronicle of Dallas and its growth can be found than that in
Hermes Nye’s autobiographical novel, Sweet
Beast, I Have Gone Prowling. From Nye’s arrival in Dallas in 1935
to practice law to the closing episodes of the book in 1970, he monitors
the pulse of a city he adores. Readers are tempted to identify his
“fictional” characters despite Nye’s disclaimer: “This is a
historical novel of the Twentieth Century. To lend it an air of
authenticity I have occasionally used the real names of certain persons,
of such folk for example, as lawyers, actresses, politicos and ministers
of the gospel, who have voluntarily placed themselves in the public
view. All other persons, names and characters in this book are
fictitious, and any resemblance between them and actual persons, living
or dead, is purely coincidental.” Nye
was a folksinger, recording five albums for Folkways Records; patron of
the arts, especially the Dallas Folk Music Society and the Margo Jones
Theatre; and a leader in the Texas Folklore Society, holding office as
president. Born in Chicago and raised in Kansas, he died in Dallas in
1981. His open love affair with Dallas was declared in the closing
paragraphs of Sweet Beast:
“Yes, I love it now as one loves a beautiful, dangerous and wayward
woman, as much for her faults as for her virtues, and I could approach
it now feeling that I too was part of it, that in my own way I had
helped to shape it as it was.” Elizabeth
Forsythe Hailey In
her first novel, told completely through letters, invitations,
announcements, and obituaries, Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey follows her
remarkable grandmother through seventy years. Elizabeth Alcott Steed
Garner is based on Mrs. Hailey’s actual grandmother, Elizabeth Walcott
Kendall Jones, but the letters are fiction although many a reader has
been convinced that they must have been found in the real
grandmother’s trunk. Bess, like the title of the novel, A
Woman of Independent Means, is a woman whose independent means are
sometimes material and always mental. The novel places the personal
story of Bess against the public events of the twentieth century, taking
her from childhood in Honey Grove to the beginning of her married life
in Dallas, to widowhood in St. Louis, to her return to Dallas as a
businesswoman, and her second marriage. Tension comes through Bess’s
stated motivations in her letters in contrast with her real ones sensed
by the reader. Mrs.
Hailey was born and educated in Dallas, where she worked for a time on
the Dallas Morning News. She
now lives in California. A Woman
of Independent Means has been specially re-issued for the twentieth
anniversary of its publication. William
Brammer William
Brammer sets the three interlocking novels In
The Gay Place in the capital of an unnamed state in the Southwest
that is unmistakably Texas, with detailed descriptions of Austin
landmarks — the capitol, the memorial fountain at the University of
Texas, and Scholz Beer Garten, where it is said more legislation is
decided than in the House and Senate combined. For the governor of the
unnamed state, Brammer creates a master politician, Arthur Fenstemaker,
who is not unlike Lyndon B. Johnson, whom Brammer served as press aide
when Mr. Johnson was in the Senate. Brammer was only thirty when he published The Gay Place, which received a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award. The Fort Worth native died in Austin in 1978. Elithe
Hamilton Kirkland Memoirs
written by a remarkable woman of eighty-three who had lived through the
Texas revolution, seen the growth of the Republic, and become involved
in landmark legal cases were handed to novelist Elithe Hamilton Kirkland
by representatives of the Texas State Historical Association in 1953
with the idea that a full story might be developed. They became the
outline For Love is a Wild
Assault, a carefully-researched novel published six years later and
based on the life of Harriet Moore Page Potter Ames, mother of eighteen,
who had been married to Page, the gambler, at the beginning of the Texas
revolution; to Potter, the politician, first secretary of the Texas navy
and state senator from the Red River District; and to Ames, the
businessman who befriended her at the tragic shooting of Potter. Mrs.
Kirkland, a native of Coleman and graduate of North Texas State
University, was well familiar with the period of the Texas republic,
having written an earlier novel, Divine
Average, set in that era and treating the conflict between
Latin-American and Anglo-American cultures along the Rio Grande. Mrs.
Kirkland’s descriptions of Potter’s Point on Caddo Lake match
perfectly the landscapes to be found at that scenic lake astride the
Texas-Louisiana line east of Jefferson. It is surprising, therefore,
that she had never seen the area she describes so vividly. “I didn’t
want to see Potter’s Point for fear the reality would spoil the
mystique created by Harriet’s memoirs,” Mrs. Kirkland recalls. She
died in Wimberley in 1992. Jewel
Gibson Critics
consider Joshua Beene and God
a book far ahead of its time. When it was published in 1946, the
ministerial alliance in Conroe, Texas, agreed to condemn the book from
the pulpits of that East Texas community. A Random House representative
told the author, then an English teacher in Spring, Texas: “Now I can
sell a religious book, and I can sell a funny book, but I’ll be durned
if I can sell a funny, religious book.” Present-day readers are more
likely to accept the book as being what one critic called “hilariously
satirical without blasphemy” in its account of the dominant figure of
the Spring Creek community—Joshua Beene, chief elder of the Church of
Christ, president of the school board, justice of the peace,
self-appointed game warden, and leader of a fifty-year battle with the
Baptists. The book treats Joshua’s sixty-ninth year on earth and his acceptance of the Biblical admonition that “The days of our years are three score years and ten.” Although the the setting is identified as Spring Creek, the major scenes are still to be found in Bald Prairie, Mrs. Gibson’s birthplace in Robertson County, where her experiences were given a fictional treatment in Joshua Beene. Mrs. Gibson is the author of a second novel, Black Gold, and four plays. After she retired from teaching at Sam Houston State University, she and her husband made their home in Corsicana. She died in 1989. Frank
X. Tolbert No
Texan can hope to match Frank X. Tolbert’s itineraries to every
crossroads of the state or his knowledge of Texas folk and events. One
of his trips to gather material for his Dallas
Morning News column became a circumnagivation of the state—all
4,000 miles around the perimeter. Besides his career as columnist, he
wrote more than a hundred short stories and articles for The
Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and other periodicals. Neiman-Marcus,
Texas is a book of anecdotes about the Dallas specialty store, and
A Bowl of Red presents the lore of Texas chili. His first novel, Bigamy
Jones, about a cowboy of the 1870s, was selected by the New
York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 1954. It was
followed by a second novel set in West Texas, The
Staked Plain. In
Dick Dowling At Sabine Pass,
he wrote of an incident in the Civil War when a handful of Confederate
artillerymen led by Dowling turned back an armada of twenty-one Union
warships—a battle sometimes referred to as the Thermopylae of the
Civil War. A
fourth-generation Texan born in Amarillo, Tolbert graduated
from Texas Tech. He was a sports columnist for the Fort
Worth Star Telegram until December 1941, when he joined the Marine
Corps. He was made editor of the Leatherneck
magazine and later one of its combat correspondents. Later he lived with
his wife in Dallas, where he wrote for the Dallas
Morning News and operated a chili parlor. He died in 1984. List of works illustrated by photographs in Literary East Texas: Abernethy,
Francis E. Tales from the Big
Thicket. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961. Baker,
Karle Wilson. Family Style.
New York: Coward-McCann, 1937. Benefield,
Barry. Valiant is the Word for
Carrie. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935. ______.
The Chicken-Wagon Family. New
York: The Century Co., 1925. Brammer,
William. The Gay Place.
Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1961. Brewer,
J. Mason. Dog Ghosts. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1958. ______.
The Word on the Brazos.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953. Byrd,
Sigman. The Redlander. New
York: Dutton, 1939. Cooper,
Madison. Sironia, Texas.
Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1952. Cross,
Ruth. The Big Road. New York:
Longmans, 1931. Gibson,
Jewel. Joshua Beene and God.
New York: Random House, 1946. Goyen,
William. The House of Breath.
New York: Random House, 1949. Green,
Ben K. Horse Tradin’. New
York: Knopf, 1971. Hailey,
Elizabeth Forsythe. A Woman of
Independent Means. New York: Viking, 1978 Hale,
Leon. Bonney’s Place.
Garden City: Doubleday, 1971. ______.
Turn South at the Second Bridge.
Garden City: Doubleday, 1965. Humphrey,
William. Home from the Hill.
New York: Knopf, 1958. ______.
The Ordways.New York: Knopf,
1965. Johnson,
Siddie Joe. Cat Hotel. New
York: Longmans, 1967. ______.
New Town in Texas. New York:
Longmans, 1942. Kirkland,
Elithe Hamilton. Love is a Wild
Assault. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Krey,
Laura. ...And Tell of Time. Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1938. ______.
On the Long Tide. Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1940. Morris,
Suzanne. Galveston. Garden
City: Doubleday, 1976. Nye,
Hermes. Sweet Beast, I Have Gone
Prowling. Dallas: Cross-Timbers Press, 1972. Owens,
William A. This Stubborn SoiL.
New York: Scribner’s, 1966. Perry,
George Sessions. Hold Autumn in
Your Hand. New York: Viking, 1941. Roark,
Garland. Drill a Crooked Hole.
Garden City: Doubleday, 1968. Thompson,
Thomas. Blood and Money.
Garden City: Doubleday, 1976. Tolbert,
Frank X. Dick Dowling at Sabine
Pass. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962. Westheimer,
David. Summer on the Water.
New York: Macmillan, 1948. This
guide to LITERARY EAST TEXAS
was created by Fred Tarpley for
THE TEXAS HUMANITIES RESOURCE CENTER |