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Davis makes extensive use of untapped literary archives to weave a fascinating portrait of six Texas writers, calling themselves the Mad Dogs, who came of age during a period of rapid social change: Bud Shrake, Larry L. King, Billy Lee Brammer, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, and Peter Gent.
At the height of the sixties, a group of Texas writers stood apart from Texas’ conservative establishment. Calling themselves the Mad Dogs, these six writers—Bud Shrake, Larry L. King, Billy Lee Brammer, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, and Peter Gent—closely observed the effects of the Vietnam War; the Kennedy assassination; the rapid population shift from rural to urban environments; Lyndon Johnson’s rise to national prominence; the Civil Rights Movement; Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys; Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, the new Outlaw music scene; the birth of a Texas film industry; Texas Monthly magazine; the flowering of “Texas Chic”; and Ann Richards’ election as governor. In Texas Literary Outlaws, Steven L. Davis makes extensive use of untapped literary archives to weave a fascinating portrait of writers who came of age during a period of rapid social change. With Davis’s eye for vibrant detail and a broad historical perspective, Texas Literary Outlaws moves easily between H. L. Hunt’s Dallas mansion and the West Texas oil patch, from the New York literary salon of Elaine’s to the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, from Dennis Hopper on a film set in Mexico to Jerry Jeff Walker crashing a party at Princeton University. The Mad Dogs were less interested in Texas’ mythic past than in the world they knew firsthand—a place of fast-growing cities and hard-edged political battles. The Mad Dogs crashed headfirst into the sixties, and their legendary excesses have often overshadowed their literary production. Davis never shies away from criticism in this no-holds-barred account, yet he also shows how the Mad Dogs’ rambunctious personae have deflected a true understanding of their deeper aims. Despite their popular image, the Mad Dogs were deadly serious as they turned their gaze on their home state, and they chronicled Texas culture with daring, wit, and sophistication.
To Rory Yates being a Texas Ranger is about justice, but all of that changes when he is brought to a small southern town to help uncover the mysteries behind a local woman's death—only to discover corruption and lies. Texas Ranger Rory Yates is not keen for hero status. But it's unavoidable once his girlfriend, country singer Willow Dawes, writes a song about his bravery. Rory escapes his newfound fame when he's sent to the remote West Texas town of Rio Lobo, a municipality with two stoplights. And now, according to the Chief of Police, it has one too many Texas Rangers. Rio Lobo Detective Ariana Delgado is the one who requested Rory, and the only person who believes a local councilwoman's seemingly accidental death is a murder. Then Rory begins to uncover a tangle of small-town secrets, favors, and lies as crooked as Texas law is straight. To get to the truth before more people die, Rory is forced to take liberties with the investigation. The next ballad of Rory Yates may not be about a hero, but rather an outlaw song.
In the tradition of Ian Frazier's Great Plains, and as vivid as the work of Cormac McCarthy, an intoxicating, singularly illuminating history of the Texas borderlands from their settlement through seven generations of Roger D. Hodge's ranching family. What brought the author's family to Texas? What is it about Texas that for centuries has exerted a powerful allure for adventurers and scoundrels, dreamers and desperate souls, outlaws and outliers? In search of answers, Hodge travels across his home state--which he loves and hates in shifting measure--tracing the wanderings of his ancestors into forgotten histories along vanished roads. Here is an unsentimental, keenly insightful attempt to grapple with all that makes Texas so magical, punishing, and polarizing. Here is a spellbindingly evocative portrait of the borderlands--with its brutal history of colonization, conquest, and genocide; where stories of death and drugs and desperation play out daily. And here is a contemplation of what it means that the ranching industry that has sustained families like Hodge's for almost two centuries is quickly fading away, taking with it a part of our larger, deep-rooted cultural inheritance. A wholly original fusion of memoir and history--as piercing as it is elegiac--Texas Blood is a triumph.
A fascinating journey through the Lone Star State’s unruly past— with maps, photos, and more Texas rightfully claims a celebrated place in the “wildest” West of both myth and reality—which makes it truly stranger than fiction that The Crime Buff’s Guide to Outlaw Texas is the first-ever travel guide to the many sites related to the Lone Star State’s renowned rambunctious past, complete with GPS coordinates that put you at the scene of the action. From outlaws like Sam Bass and John Wesley Hardin to Bonnie & Clyde and Houston’s notorious Candy Man killer, Texas has dozens of places where true-crime buffs can actually stand close to history. For many readers, the attraction to these sites—some well-known, some obscured by time—is irresistible. Written with the same fast-paced, gripping style that marked the author’s widely praised earlier work, The Crime Buff’s Guide to Outlaw Texasis an indispensable resource for both criminal-history enthusiasts and travelers. Each site description includes a concise summary of the location’s significance, historical context, maps, directions, and photos. Praise for a previous book by the same author, The Darkest Night “Heartbreaking . . . Not unlike Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.” —Chicago Sun-Times “This uncommon story has every chilling component of human terror, drama, and suspense that readers of true crime look for.” —Vincent Bugliosi, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Helter Skelter “A very, very, good book . . . written by a very, very, good writer.” —Ann Rule, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Stranger Beside Me
In James Patterson's #1 New York Times bestselling thriller, a Texas Ranger fights for his life, his freedom, and the town he loves as he investigates his ex-wife's murder. Across the ranchlands and cities of his home state, Rory Yates's discipline and law enforcement skills have carried him far: from local highway patrolman to the honorable rank of Texas Ranger. He arrives in his hometown to find a horrifying crime scene and a scathing accusation: he is named a suspect in the murder of his ex-wife, Anne, a devoted teacher whose only controversial act was ending her marriage to a Ranger. In search of the killer, Yates plunges into the inferno of the most twisted and violent minds he's ever encountered, vowing to never surrender. That code just might bring him out alive.
This “standard text of the defining era of gay literati” tells the cultural history of the interconnected lives of the 20th century's most influential gay writers (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture. But the change was only beginning. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. Edward Albee brought his prickly iconoclasm to the American theater. Edmund White laid bare his own life in stylized, autobiographical works. Armistead Maupin wove a rich tapestry of the counterculture, queer and straight. Mart Crowley brought gay men's lives out of the closet and onto the stage. And Tony Kushner took them beyond the stage, to the center of American ideas. With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond. Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.
Once upon a time there was an innocent lad from West Texas who wrote a novel and fell in with a rabble of Texas writers as they were bridging the literary gap between J. Frank Dobie and his paisanos and the current bumper crop of Texas writers who seem to be everywhere writing about everything. This rowdy rabble of gap bridgers bonded in a sort of literary and social club they called Maddog Inc. (Motto: Doing indefinable services to mankind.) But our hero managed to live through it all anyway. This is his story. Jay Milner was part of a generation of Texas writers whose heyday lasted from the late 1950s through the 1970s. The group comprised Billie Lee Brammer, Edwin "Bud" Shrake, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, Larry L. King, Pete Gent, and (peripherally) Larry McMurtry and Willie Morris, among others. From the musical scene there were the "picker poets" such as Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, and Waylon Jennings. Some of the primary works coming from this generation of writers include Brammer's The Gay Place, Shrake's Strange Peaches, Cartwright's Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter, King's The Whorehouse Papers and None But a Blockhead, Jan Reid's The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, and Willie Nelson's album Phases and Stages.
Growing up near the Sabine, journalist Wes Ferguson, like most East Texans, steered clear of its murky, debris-filled waters, where alligators lived in the backwater sloughs and an occasional body was pulled from some out-of-the-way crossing. The Sabine held a reputation as a haunt for a handful of hunters and loggers, more than a few water moccasins, swarms of mosquitoes, and the occasional black bear lumbering through swamp oak and cypress knees. But when Ferguson set out to do a series of newspaper stories on the upper portion of the river, he and photographer Jacob Croft Botter were entranced by the river’s subtle beauty and the solitude they found there. They came to admire the self-described “river rats” who hunted, fished, and swapped stories along the muddy water—plain folk who love the Sabine as much as Hill Country vacationers love the clear waters of the Guadalupe. Determined to travel the rest of the river, Ferguson and Botter loaded their gear and launched into the stretch of river that charts the line between the states and ends at the Gulf of Mexico. To learn more about The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment, sponsors of this book's series, please click here.
Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, the Newton Boys, the Santa Claus Bank Robbers. . . . During the era of gangsters and organized crime, Texas hosted its fair share of guns and gambling, moonshine and morphine, ransom and robbery. The state’s crime wave hit such a level that in 1927 the Texas Bankers Association offered a reward of $5,000 for a dead bank robber; no reward was given for one captured alive. Veteran historian T. Lindsay Baker brings his considerable sleuthing skills to the dark side, leading readers on a fascinating tour of the most interesting and best preserved crime scenes in the Lone Star State. Gangster Tour of Texas traces a trail of crime that had its beginnings in 1918, when the Texas legislature outlawed alcohol, and persisted until 1957, when Texas Rangers closed down the infamous casinos of Galveston. Baker presents detailed maps, photographs of criminals, victims, and law officers, and pictures of the crime scenes as they appear today. Steeped in solid historical research, including personal visits by the author to every site described in the book, this volume offers entertaining and informative insights into a particularly lawless period in our nation’s history. Readers interested in true crime, regional history, or this unique aspect of heritage tourism will derive hours of enjoyment as they follow--on the road or from their armchairs--the trail of both cops and robbers in Gangster Tour of Texas. “Baker knows how to spin a yarn that keeps his readers engrossed; knows that it does history no harm to write it so folks will enjoy many illustrations, maps, and pictures of outlaws, lawmen, victims, witnesses, and crime scenes that accompany each story. Plus, his picture captions are as informative as his story narratives."--Bill Neal, author, Getting Away with Murder on the Texas Frontier