The Fifty Best Texas Books [August 1981]

History, fiction, legend, drama—A. C. Greene picks 'em and tells why.

by A. C. Greene

May 2002

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* I and Claudie, Dillon Anderson. Until Clint Hightower (the "I") and his sidekick, Claudie, first appeared in Atlantic Monthly, to which I had recently been given a subscription as a graduation present, I had despaired of ever seeing Texas humor in such an august (then) journal. It was enough for me that I and Claudie (1951) was picaresque (haven't you always wanted to have a genuine occasion to use that word, after hearing it all the way from ninth grade through graduate school?), but in addition, it was Texas that Clint and Claudie roamed, conning their way, a pair of up-to-date Gentle Grafters outsmarting bankers and oilmen but almost as often falling victim to their own softheartedness or their own cleverness. Years later I discovered that Dillon Anderson was not some ink-stained wretch but a highly succesful Houston corporate lawyer. I eventually met him at a Texas Institute of Letters dinner in Houston, but it was one of those "hello, I've always liked your work" kinds of meetings, and he died before I had the chance (or the nerve) to sit down with him and explain why I wished he had been a flop as a lawyer so he could have done nothing but write.

* 13 Days to Glory: The Siege of the Alamo, Lon Tinkle. Lon Tinkle was the most courtly man of letters Texas has ever produced, but he had strange little fears. When Walter Lord's intensive study of the Battle of the Alamo, A Time to Stand, came out in 1961, I stated in a review that whereas Lord's work was more inclusive and historically evaluative than Tinkle's 13 Days to Glory (1958), I preferred Lon's book because it was more revealing. While factually sound, it explored the mystery of what kept those men at the Alamo to die, as Lord pointed out, somewhat needlessly. I got a phone call that afternoon from Lon Tinkle expressing his gratitude, but also his wonder. Since we were, at that time, book critics on competing Dallas newspapers, he had quivered (his word) all week that I might seize the opportunity to elevate the fine Lord book and denounce that of my rival. (Those who recall his matchless diction can hear his voice on that sentence.) I was the one to quiver a few weeks later when I introduced Walter Lord at a book-and-author luncheon, but he made only an amused reference to the review as we parted: "Oh . . . that."

Tinkle's 13 Days to Glory gives the essence of the Alamo story without attempting to exhaust history's explanation. He is fair to the Mexican attackers, even Santa Anna, and does not hallow the slain Texans; neither does he insist that all the legends are true. But he makes implicit the strange consensus of the defenders to stay and die—and that is what makes 13 Days to Glory such uncommonly good reading.

* Southwest, John Houghton Allen. This collection of autobiographical essays about an older lifestyle on the border of South Texas defies description. John Houghton Allen writes with great sympathy for the people and the land where he lived, but he writes more like a nobleman than a rancher. The short pieces in Southwest (1952) are subtly tinged with that air of privilege, of being birth-appointed to a role in history that may have been tragic but was necessary. That's not the tone one expects to find in Texas ranch tales. His gentlemen ranchers and their spoiled sons are as devoted to horses as to wives—with the exception, now and then, of other men's wives. The Mexican ranch hands and their folklore go back to Spanish times, when privilege came naturally—an inheritance passed along by the Spanish ranchers who settled the kingdom of the Rio Grande in the eighteenth century to the dynastic Anglos who superseded them (or stole their titles and their privileges). But Southwest is a fascinating, unusual book about Texas that isn't duplicated by any other writer. Reading it is like reading about a foreign country; Randado is akin to Brigadoon, and fantasy fits snugly within Allen's romantic style.

* Hold Autumn in Your Hand, George Sessions Perry. Perry was a good writer, and his best writings owe their power to the Texas society they describe. Walls Rise Up (1939) is an amusing novel about two down-and-out Texans trying to survive in the Brazos bottoms by doing as little work as possible. But I like Hold Autumn in Your Hand (1941) because it attempts more. Walls Rise Up is a trifle on the Texas trite side. Hold Autumn in Your Hand goes deep into the character and integrity of Sam Tucker, a Texas tenant farmer in those same bottoms, who, though "too poor to flag a gutwagon," continues to fight nature, the seasons, the river, and a good many of his fellow men for the satisfaction of bringing something (himself, if you want some philosophy) from the earth, despite never being able to pull back and watch. But it is something more than just another man's fight against nature; Hold Autumn in Your Hand is full of country humor—pretty racy, of course—and Texas common sense, presuming it's different from other kinds of common sense. We may have lost that old tie with the earth our immediate forefathers had, but modern readers will find that no barrier to enjoyment. Perry's later disabilities (crippling arthritis) and his unexplained death (his body was found in a Connecticut river two months after he apparently wandered away from his home) ended what was, at the time, the most successful Texas writing career to be found. (Hold Autumn in Your Hand was made into a film titled The Southerner, with native Texan Zachary Scott playing Sam Tucker.)

* The Inheritors, Philip Atlee. In 1940 there weren't many books being written about contemporary Texas, other than poor farmer or Depression novels, although by then Texas had turned a corner very few of its residents and almost none of its writers recognized: it had become an urban state. In 1968 I did detailed research at the University of Texas at Austin and found October 1928 to be the exact month when Texas swung to having more people living in cities and towns than on farms, ranches, or other rural locations. In The Inheritors Philip Atlee (James Phillips) wrote about the urban scene in Fort Worth. This isn't Cowtown. This is the young social set—carousing driving big cars too fast, going from party to country club to any kind of devilment and eventual crackups—physical and mental. It's an overindulged generation. One scathing chapter has this lost tribe out on the Fort Worth dump at night shooting rats for thrills, they're so bored with the usual run of fornication, drunkenness, and bragging about Daddy's money. The story is well done, and it was told thirty or forty years before its time. Few Texas books have been able to repeat the harsh dismay, the inspired brutality, of The Inheritors.

* Horse Tradin', Ben K. Green, D.V.M. That noblest of all New york editors, Angus Cameron, called me in the summer of 1965 and asked if I were kin to a Dr. Ben Green. I said no, after briefly discounting the significance of the final e on my name when it comes to claiming kin. Angus said I was the loser, because Green had written a story ("Gray Mules") in Southwest Review that was a classic. He suggested I call Ben, which I did. This began a literary adventure I am not likely to repeat, because there can be only one Ben Green in a lifetime. Although I was closer to him than anyone in the book world, I never uncovered the real Ben Green. I never tried. But I had a unique triumph: he never got mad at me. Ben was a spellbinder—he admitted, with charming haste, he knew more about horses than any person alive (I believed it). He became, on publication of Horse Tradin' (1967), a major writer—yet most of his fellow writers would not admit it. Why? Because he was also hardheaded, vain, perverse, dissembling, and impossibly cantankerous at times. For example, those D.V.M. initials on Horse Tradin' never appeared on another Green book, because they were false. He tried to hide the fact the he had served time in Huntsville, that he had been married, and that he was relatively young—at least ten years younger than he looked. He was a glorious storyteller who got furious if you implied his stories were fiction, yet his writing in things like The Shield Mares proves his humanity was greater than he could face. He loved my wife and he once sent a fellow 150 miles to plant a special peach tree he was giving her. When he died, I cried. I couldn't help it.

My other 38 choices for Texas' best books are:

A Ranchman's Recollections, Frank S. Hastings

Hound-Dog Man, Fred Gipson

The Evolution of a State, or, Recollections of Old Texas Days, Noah Smithwick, compiled by Nanna Smithwick Donaldson

A Texas Ranger and Frontiersman: The Days of Buck Barry in Texas, 1845—1906, edited by James K. Greer

Sam Bass, Wayne Gard

Horseman, Pass By, Larry McMurtry

Texas History Movies, text by John Rosenfield, Jr., illustrations by Jack Patton

The Bone Pickers, Al Dewlen

The Butterfield Overland Mail, Waterman L. Ormsby

Triggernometry, Eugene Cunningham

Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman, J. Evetts Haley

Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, Roy Bedichek

The Great Plains, Walter Prescott Webb

The Stubborn Soil, William A. Owens

The Wonderful Country, Tom Lea

A Journey Through Texas, Frederick Law Olmsted

Six-guns and Saddle Leather: A Bibliography of Book and Pamphlets on Western Outlaws and Gunmen, Ramon Adams

The Mexican Side of the Texas Revolution, Carlos E. Castañeda

Love is a Wild Assault, Elithe Hamilton Kirkland

Johnny Texas, Carol Hoff

The House of Breath, William Goyen

Blood and Money, Thomas Thompson

A Texas Trilogy, Preston Jones

Armadillo in the Grass, Shelby Hearon

The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement, Rupert Norval Richardson

. . . And Other Dirty Stories, Larry L. King

The Gay Place, William Brammer

A Time and a Place, William Humphrey

I'll Die Before I'll Run: The Story of the Great Feuds of Texas, C. L. Sonnichsen

Six Years With the Texas Rangers, James B. Gillet

Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History, Paul Horgan

Events and Celebrations, R. G. Vliet

Sironia, Texas, Madison Cooper

A Woman of the People, Benjamin Capps

The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston, Marquis James

Leaving Cheyenne, Larry McMurtry

Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, John A. Lomax

Goodbye to a River, John Graves

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