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Michael Barnes thinks the exchange should start with “The Trip to Bountiful.”
Although he isn’t a fan of horror movies, he agrees that “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is among the most influential movies about the state.
To salute Texas Independence Week in 2019, my former American-Statesman colleague Dave Thomas and I put out a list of the 53 best books about Texas.
It contained some beloved classics, such as John Graves’ “Goodbye to a River,” and some thrilling newcomers, like Attica Locke’s “Bluebird, Bluebird and Monica Muñoz Martinez’s “The Injustice Never Leaves You.”
We encouraged readers to respond with their favorites. They did. On June 14, 2019, I published those provocative responses, including several from folks who wondered why we had left off James Michener’s doorstop novel, “Texas.”
Not that I never quarrel with McMurtry. He sometimes harbors a touch too much romanticism, especially in his early work. His women strike me as a bit much, too heroic and long-suffering and strong. Too
good. He sees ’em tough, but seldom does he see ’em mean. And Texas probably has as many mean, bitchy, neurotic women as any place on earth, with the possible exception of Manhattan; there, of course, they’ve gathered from all points of the compass, while our own crop is largely homegrown. McMurtry recognizes their ability to fight back, to survive in tough country, and knows that Texas women may often be stronger than their men. But I think he misses the extent to which large numbers purely enjoy wrecking and plundering and flashing their stingers.
Tell me a little about yourself.
I grew up in South Texas–San Antonio, which is inland, and Rockport, which is on the coast. After graduating with an MA from the University of Texas I lived in New York for four years and worked in the publishing industry, and then to save myself from the fate of being an editor the rest of my life, returned to graduate school in Houston and received a PhD. I taught in Texas for a couple years, then joined the faculty here at Penn State in 1995. Generally I teach creative writing, but also hybrid classes of creative writing/literature, such as I’m doing this fall in an Honors course titled The Magic of Blood, about literature of the Southwest.
True West Magazine
Jim Hoy’s highly personal biography of the Kansas Flint Hills, two new biographies of Butch Cassidy, Bill Neal’s autobiography and Deborah Swenson’s debut Western novel.
From my earliest years, I remember my parents sharing with me their love of the American West and their app-reciation and knowledge of the West’s writers, artists, educators and filmmakers. I discovered quickly that I could travel great distances from North Hollywood, California, across the West through the pages of Western writers whose personal experiences and imaginations allowed me to saddle up right along with them and realize “firsthand” the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, the magnificent mystery of the Grand Canyon and the endless, waving, undulating sea of grass of the Great Plains. I know that if I had been given Jim Hoy’s