The huge man-fig tree that sits on the town square in the fictional Coastal Bend town of Thornham (probably West Columbia) is the gathering place for the town's male gossips. Under this tree reputations are made and broken, rumors are spread, and a twisted folk history of the town is created.
"Under the Man-Fig," by Mollie Moore Davis, a popular late-nineteenth century poet, novelist, and historian, is part romance, realism, color, and satire. The idea that men are the purveyors of gossip rings a change on the usual cliche that women are the worst rumor-mongers. Davis' main characters,...

The first novel to portray seriously nineteenth-century cowboy life, The Wire-Cutters was Mollie E. Moore Davis's tour de force inspired by Texas' Fence Cutting Wars fought by competing cattlemen and ranchers. First published in 1899, the novel introduced readers to a new kind of storytelling that prefigured an entire American literary genre - the Western - and predated Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) and Andy Adams's Log of a cowboy (1903), two novels widely regarded as the first Westerns by many unfamiliar with Davis's groundbreaking work. Centered around the destructive fence-cutting...