"Is literary Texas a banana republic or an empire?" Tom Pilkington has written a series of lively and delightfully learned essays addressing this question.
Pilkington traces the evolution of Texas literature from its roots (including Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the state's literary "prototype," and J. Frank Dobie, who "taught Texans how to succeed at the culture game") to its twentieth-century flowering (writers like John Graves, Rolando Hinojosa, Cormac McCarthy, and Larry McMurtry). He explores questions as diverse as who is a Texan, what makes a "Texas" writer, what distinguishes the...