- Texas A & M University Press
Exiled: The Last Days of Sam Houston
Key Metrics
- Ron Rozelle
- Texas A & M University Press
- Hardcover
- 9781623495862
- 9.3 X 6.1 X 0.9 inches
- 1.25 pounds
- Biography & Autobiography > Political
- English
Book Description
Houston was often a bundle of complicated contradictions. He was a spirited advocate for public education but had little formal education himself. He was very much a Jackson man but disagreed with his mentor on the treatment of Native Americans. He was a slaveholder who opposed abolition but scuttled his own political reputation by resisting the South's move toward secession.
After refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy in 1861, Houston was swiftly evicted from the governor's office. Let me tell you what is coming, he later said from a window at the Tremont Hotel in Galveston. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, you may win Southern independence if God be not against you, but I doubt it. Houston died just two years later, and the nation was indeed fractured.
Ron Rozelle's masterful biographical portrait here lingers on Houston's final years, especially as lived out in Huntsville, when so much of his life's work seemed on the verge of coming undone. Artfully written for the general reader, Exiled: The Last Days of Sam Houston is a compelling look at Sam Houston's legacy and twilight years.
Author Bio
I’m the author of Into That Good Night, a memoir, The Windows of Heaven, a novel of the 1900 Galveston storm, A Place Apart, a novel set in modern day Ohio, Warden: Death and Life in the Texas Prison System (coauthored with Jim Willett) and Description & Setting: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting a Believable World of People, Places, and Events, a volume in the Writer’s Digest Write Great Fiction series.
My memoir, Into That Good Night, was the first non-agented property published by New York’s venerable Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in over five years, was a national short list finalist for the P.E.N. Prize and the Texas Institute of Letters Carr P. Collins Award and was selected as the second best work of nonfiction in the nation for the year 1998 by the San Antonio Express-News. I’ve taught writing workshops at numerous conferences and universities, and was twice the memoir teacher at the Newman National Writer’s Conference at Mississippi College.
Touching Winter, my novel made up of a quartet of stories, was published in October, 2005, by TCU Press and was a short list finalist for The Texas Institute of Letters Best Fiction of the Year Prize. My Boys and Girls are in There: The 1937 New London School Disaster (Texas A&M University Press) was the recipient of the Calvert Prize, was pronounced the “sleeper hit” of the 2012 Texas Book Festival, and was a short list finalist for the Best Nonfiction Award given by the Writers’ League of Texas.
Sundays with Ron Rozelle (I hate that title; it sounds like a devotional), a collection of some of my newspaper columns, was published by TCU Press. My most recent book is Exiled: The Last Days of Sam Houston, published by Texas A&M University Press. My next book, a novel titled Leaving the Country of Sin, will be published in mid March.
I was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2007 and am a proud graduate of Sam Houston State University, class of 1977.
My wife Karen, a retired third grade teacher, and I are spoiling grandparents and recently retired empty nesters with the exception of an elderly opinionated cat.
Source: ronrozellewordsmith.wordpress.com
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