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A New York Times bestselling novel, modern historical classic, and winner of the TCU Texas Book Award, The Spur Award and the Wrangler Award for Outstanding Western Novel It’s 1836, and the Mexican province of Texas is in revolt. As General Santa Anna’s forces move closer to the small fort that will soon be legend, three people’s fates will become intrinsically tied to the coming battle: Edmund McGowan, a proud and gifted naturalist; the widowed innkeeper Mary Mott; and her sixteen-year-old son, Terrell, whose first shattering experience with love has led him into the line of fire. Filled with dramatic scenes, and abounding in fictional and historical personalities—among them James Bowie, David Crockett, William Travis, and Stephen Austin—The Gates of the Alamo is a faithful and compelling look at a riveting chapter in American history.
The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.
"The majority of the stories of the Alamo fight have been partly legendary, partly hearsay and at best fragmentary. It has been left to John Myers Myers to present an exhaustively researched book which reveals the chronicle of the siege of the Alamo in an entirely different light. . . . Myers' story will stand as the best that has yet been written on the Alamo. . . . It's a classic."-Boston Post "Here is a historian with the vitality and drive to match his subject. A reporter of the first rank, he can clothe the dry bones of history with the living stuff of which today's news is made."-Chicago Tribune John Myers Myers authored sixteen books, including Doc Holliday and Tombstone's Early Years, also available as Bison Books.
Never wavering in its search for the bedrock of fact, this book is a methodical, piece-by-piece dismantling of what we thought we knew and a convincing speculation about what might have really happened during that courageous fight for independence.
A New York Times bestseller! “Lively and absorbing. . ." — The New York Times Book Review "Engrossing." —Wall Street Journal “Entertaining and well-researched . . . ” —Houston Chronicle Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head. Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war. However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos--Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels--scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over. Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas's struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness. In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn't alienate anyone. But we are not living in one of those times; the fight over the Alamo's meaning has become more pitched than ever in the past few years, even violent, as Texas's future begins to look more and more different from its past. It's the perfect time for a wise and generous-spirited book that shines the bright light of the truth into a place that's gotten awfully dark.
Winner of the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best American Historical Fiction Francis "Gil" Gilheaney is a sculptor of boundless ambition, but bad fortune and pride have driven him and his long-suffering daughter Maureen into artistic exile in Texas just after World War I. When an aging rancher commissions Gil to create a memorial statue of his son who was killed in action, Gil believes it will be his greatest achievement. But as work proceeds on the statue, Gil and Maureen come to realize that their new client is a far more complicated man than they ever expected, and that he is guarding a secret that haunts his relationship with his son even in death.
Writing timeless essays that capture vanished worlds and elusive perceptions, Stephen Harrigan is emerging as a national voice with an ever-expanding circle of enthusiastic readers. For those who have already experienced the pleasures of his writing—and especially for those who haven't—Comanche Midnight collects fifteen pieces that originally appeared in the pages of Texas Monthly, Travel Holiday, and Audubon magazines. The worlds Harrigan describes in these essays may be vanishing, but his writing invests them with an enduring reality. He ranges over topics from the past glories and modern-day travails of America's most legendary Indian tribe to the poisoning of Austin's beloved Treaty Oak, from the return-to-the-past realism of the movie set of Lonesome Dove to the intimate, off-season languor of Monte Carlo. If the personal essay can be described as journalism about that which is timeless, then Stephen Harrigan is a reporter of people, events, and places that will be as newsworthy years from now as they are today. Read Comanche Midnight and see if you don't agree.
From the author of the acclaimed and best-selling The Gates of the Alamo, a novel of extraordinary power about what it’s like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of today’s astronauts. At the novel’s center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight. Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son’s asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant—perhaps unreachable—her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways. In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan’s narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenth-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives—the risks, the friendships, the rituals, the training—of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting—indeed a thrilling—novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.
Originally published in 1984, Stephen Harrigan's passionate, emotionally intense second novel takes readers deep into the mysterious passageways of a Central Texas aquifer—and of the human heart. This edition includes a new afterword by the author.
It is Illinois in the 1830s, and Abraham Lincoln is an ambitious—if charmingly awkward—young circuit lawyer and state legislator. Among his friends and political colleagues are Joshua Speed, William Herndon, Stephen Douglas, and many others who have come to the exploding frontier town of Springfield to find their futures. One of these men is poet Cage Weatherby. Cage both admires and clashes with Lincoln, questioning his cautious stance on slavery. But he stays by Lincoln's side, even as Lincoln slips back and forth between high spirits and soul-hollowing sadness and depression, and even as he recovers from a disastrous courtship to marry the beautiful, capricious, politically savvy Mary Todd. Mary will bring stability to Lincoln's life, but she will also trigger a conflict that sends the two men on very different paths into the future.