Texas Christian University Press
Giant Country: Essays on Texas
Key Metrics
- Don Graham
- Texas Christian University Press
- Hardcover
- 9780875651828
- 9.36 X 6.3 X 1.2 inches
- 1.55 pounds
- Literary Collections > Essays
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
The collection begins with a twist on book introductions that sets the tone for the essays to come--a self-interview conducted poolside at an eccentric Houston motel favored by regional rock bands. Over pi�a coladas the author works on his tan and discusses timeless Texas themes: the transition of the state from a rural to an urban world, the sense of a vanishing era, and the way that artists in literature and film represent a state both infectiously grand and too big for its britches.
In Fildelphia Story, Graham remembers his Ivy League professorial stint in a city the small-town Texan who rented him a moving van looked up under F. In Doing England the Lone Star Yankee courts Oxford University and returns with a veddy British education. In The Ground Sense Necessary a native son journeys inward to explore the dry ceremonies of frontier Protestantism and to recount movingly his father's funeral in Collin County.
With his wide-ranging knowledge of classic regional works, Graham unerringly traces the style and substance of local literary giants and offers a sometimes irreverent but always entertaining look at the Texas triumvirate of Dobie, Webb and Bedichek. Other essays look at such Texas greats as Katherine Anne Porter, George Sessions Perry, William Humphrey and John Graves.
In a section he calls Polemics, Graham includes his best known essays, Palefaces vs. Redskins, a sardonic survey of the Texas literary landscape, and Anything for Larry, a tour de force that has already become a minor classic. The essay weighs the puny financial achievements of Graham against those of mega-author Larry McMurtry and never fails to bring down the house when Graham gives a public reading.
A recognized authority on celluloid Texas, Graham provides a rich sampling of his knowledge of Texas movies in pieces that blanket the territory from moo-cow cattle-drive epics to soggy Alamo sagas to urban cowboy melodramas.
In the larger-than-life state that is Texas, nobody sizes up the Lone-Star mythos, its interpreters, boosters and detractors better than Don Graham.
Author Bio
GRAHAM, Don Ballew Don Ballew Graham, the J. Frank Dobie professor of English and American literature at the University of Texas at Austin, author, critic, and the pre-eminent scholar of Texas film, literature and popular culture died suddenly on Saturday, June 22nd.
He was the author of ten books and editor of another six, including "No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy" (1989), "Kings of Texas: The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Family" (2003), and "Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber and the Making of a Legendary American Film" (2018).
He was also a writer at large for Texas Monthly and past president of the Texas Institute for Letters, the leading advocate for the state's literature. He was born in Collin County in 1940, when it was still mostly cotton farms, and he was generally amused by students who had never seen a cotton boll. After graduating from Carrollton High School, he earned his bachelor's degree at the University of North Texas (then North Texas State University) and a PhD at UT Austin in 1971, and worked at the University of Pennsylvania, before returning to Texas in 1976. He also taught in the Normandy program in France, and at Université Paul Valéry in Montepellier, and at the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. A brilliant and beloved teacher, he won multiple teaching awards at the University of Texas and in 2014 was named one of Alcade's Top Ten Professors Ever.
He wore his achievements lightly, but he wore them well. Irreverent, funny, fearless, loyal, incisive, to use adjectives he might have abhorred, his powerful and singular voice will be much missed. He is survived by his gorgeous wife of 28 years, Betsy Berry, brother Bill Graham, and other relatives alongside Tom and Viv, two rather literary cats.
Source: Dallas News
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