John Graves contributed to Texas Monthly from 1977 through 2006. Over the years, he also wrote for the Sierra Club, the Atlantic, Esquire, and the New Yorker. He was born in 1920 in Fort Worth, where he explored the Trinity River bottom before it became littered with beer cans. He graduated from Rice University, received a master’s degree from Columbia, and served as a first lieutenant in the Marines in the Pacific theater of World War II, where he lost sight in one eye. He taught at the University of Texas and Texas Christian University before writing ten books, including the notable Texas books Goodbye to a River, Hard Scrabble, From a Limestone Ledge, and Myself and Strangers. Goodbye to a River won the Texas Institute of Letters’ Carr P. Collins Award and was nominated for a National Book Award in 1961. Graves died in 2013.