Check out pages 30-37 of the January Lone Star Literary Life Magazine online, which features my article on Texas novels essential to understand the Texas frontier psyche. In “Texas Reads” I list four novelists—Larry McMurtry, Elmer Kelton, Fred Gipson and Fred Grove—who deserve to be enshrined on the Mount Rushmore of Texas frontier fiction.
Over the course of my writing career, I was blessed to meet three of the authors—McMurtry, Kelton and Grove—and get their books inscribed to me. I never met Fred Gipson, who died a year after I graduated from Baylor and three years before I started writing western novels, but I’m good friends with his biographer Mike Cox, so I consider myself just a handshake away from Gipson and from Old Yeller.
What Baby Boomer doesn’t remember the Disney adaptation of Gipson’s classic novel? I was seven years old when Old Yeller was released, and it is the first movie I ever remember crying at. And, it’s a movie I’ve more recently shared with our five Grands, even taking them to Mason to see the statue of Old Yeller outside the local library.
In addition to Old Yeller, I selected McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which became the classic Texas trail drive story, and Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained, set around San Angelo during the destructive 1950s drouth.
Though less known today than the other three, Fred Grove was an equally talented storyteller, and I selected what I call his horseracing trilogy of The Great Horse Race, Match Race and Search for the Breed, which provided entertaining insight into the Texas frontier character.
All four authors are now gone, but they remain worthy of reading because of their skill with the written word and their humor, sometimes subtle and sometimes ironic, in chronicling the Texas frontier experience. Thanks to Lone Star Literature Life Editor-in-Chief Amy Kelly and Consulting Editor Leslie Storey for the opportunity to appear in their magazine and to the entire LSLL team for promoting Texas letters and authors.
