Like many a pioneer exiting the eastern forests, Paul Christensen felt the strangeness of an alien landscape when he first arrived in Texas in 1974. Schooled in the cool colors of life and poetry in the urban East, he approached his new career in the Southwest with missionary zeal and purpose: to discover the land and the kind of people and poetry it produced.
"West of the American Dream" is a multifaceted account of that search. Christensen shares his feelings of culture shock in eastcentral Texas as he meets the cowboy version of the bluecollar Texan and his Mexican American neighbors....

In 1893, a literary critic in the "Galveston Daily News" lamented that the many women writers in the state, "women of noble talents," had largely gone unnoticed by the literary industry. Her lament has reverberated throughout the past century, as women's letters in Texas have been further marginalized by the male canonmakers who paid tribute to the Texas Mystique--oil derricks, cowboys, and the Alamo: masculine western icons that shaped a region's literature.
"Texas"" Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own" is a sweeping account of a rich yet largely ignored literary history covering...

Is New Mexico truly the "Land of Enchantment," or is it a land of acrimony, where opposing values, backgrounds, and political and economic interests give rise to an atmosphere of conflict? According to David L. Caffey, it is both, and both qualities contribute to the region's appeal as a source of raw material for works of fiction. New Mexico offers the writer a varied landscape, a mosaic of cultures, and a colorful history, but conflict, necessary for fiction, is also found in cultural differences, opposing views on land and water use, and conflicting values concerning individual freedom and...

Chronicling a literary life that ended not so long ago, "Donald Barthelme: ""The"" Genesis of a Cool Sound" gives the reader a glimpse at the years when Barthelme began to find his literary voice. A revealing look at Donald Barthelme's influences and development, this account begins with a detailed biographical sketch of his life and spans his growth into a true avant-garde literary figure.
Donald Barthleme was born in Philadelphia but raised in Houston, the son of a forward-thinking architect father and a literary mother. Educated at the University of Houston, he became a fine arts...

Cities, like people, may be best known by the way they party. For nearly a century-and-a-half, San Antonio has partied well. In this fascinating look at late-nineteenth-century festivals in San Antonio, Judith Berg Sobre brings an art historian's sensibility to accounts of the pageantry, parades, and festive events that typified a city welcoming settlers from several nations and American regions into a community that valued their individuality even while it taught them a new identity. Six historic festivals provide windows into the culture of this polyglot city: the Fourth of July,...

"Fig newtons" of the imagination and of memory abound in this marvelous collection of twenty-two stories by Texas women. "Fig newtons" such as the magical moment when a dying grandmother teaches Sue Ellen to dance, the red shoes Tammy the Tupperware Princess dons in New Orleans, the yellow thread needed to put Sue Tidwell's quilt together, or weekends of escape and sisterhood spent in El Paso's McCoy Hotel.
The stories chosen here--and introduced and placed in their historical and literary context by editors Sylvia Ann Grider and Lou Halsell Rodenberger--together weave a story of their...

The frontier and Western expansionism are so quintessentially a part of American history that the literature of the West and Southwest is in some senses the least regional and the most national literature of all. The frontier--the place where cultures meet and rewrite themselves upon each other's texts--continues to energize writers whose fiction evokes, destroys, and rebuilds the myth in ways that attract popular audiences and critics alike. Sara L. Spurgeon focuses on three writers whose works not only exemplify the kind of engagement with the theme of the frontier that modern authors make,...

The frontier and Western expansionism are so quintessentially a part of American history that the literature of the West and Southwest is in some senses the least regional and the most national literature of all. The frontier--the place where cultures meet and rewrite themselves upon each other's texts--continues to energize writers whose fiction evokes, destroys, and rebuilds the myth in ways that attract popular audiences and critics alike. Sara L. Spurgeon focuses on three writers whose works not only exemplify the kind of engagement with the theme of the frontier that modern authors make,...

Elise Waerenskjold is known to fans of Texas women writers as "the lady with the pen," from the title of a book of her writings. A forward-looking journalist, she sent letters and articles back to Norway that encouraged others to follow her footsteps to Texas, where a small colony of Norwegian settlers were making a new life alongside but distinct from other European immigrants.
"Undaunted" is the first full biography of Waerenskjold during her Texas years, a life story that shows much about Texas, especially in the Norwegian colonies, from 1847 until near the end of the century....