Set in Texas, The Gay Place consists of three interlocking novels, each with a different protagonist--a member of the state legislature, the state's junior senator, and the governor's press secretary. The governor himself, Arthur Fenstemaker, a master politician, infinitely canny and seductive, remains the dominant figure throughout.

Billy Lee Brammer--who served on Lyndon Johnson's staff--gives us here "the excitement of a political carnival: the sideshows, the freaks, and the ghoulish comedy atmosphere" (Saturday Review).

Originally published in...

In the golden age of Texas cinema--dating from the end of World War II to the assassination of JFK--the Western continued to...

John Steinbeck once famously wrote that "Texas is a state of mind." For those who know it well, however, the Lone Star State is more than one mind-set, more than a collection of cliches, more than a static stereotype. There are minds in Texas, Don Graham asserts, and some of the most important are the writers and filmmakers whose words and images have helped define the state to the nation, the world, and the people of Texas themselves. For many years, Graham has been critiquing Texas writers and films in the pages of Texas Monthly and other publications. In State of...

These Texas stories are among the best produced by the state's writers in the mid-twentieth century. Selected above all for their artistic excellence and their narrative mastery, they also present a vital picture of the Southwest in microcosm, as revealed in its largest state.

Texas and Texas writing moved from a Southern orientation in the 1940s--reflected here in works by William Goyen, William Humphrey, and others--to the strong Southwestern flavor of stories by such authors as Larry McMurtry and A. C. Greene to, finally, urban or Sunbelt Texas, mirrored in the edgy, sometimes...