Getting to Know Texas Authors

Jann Alexander
May 5
4 min read

In the Lone Star State, we celebrate Texas Writers Month in May. And there are so many to applaud. But where to start?

I'm featuring Texas authors all month on Pairings, because I've long loved reading Texas authors who write about Texas, and I love watching films set in Texas. And most of all, because I'm honored to join them with the July 3 release of my historical book, Unspoken: A Dust Novel, set in the Texas Panhandle in the 1930s-1950s.

Get a start with these Texas authors:

Larry McMurtry

Why: McMurtry was a prolific and astute writer about (mostly) small-town life in Texas who spent most of his life in Archer City, Texas. You probably know McMurtry's name from his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, adapted into a hit television miniseries, memorable for being a roughly-true buddy escapade between two real-life cowboys, portrayed Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones (himself a Texas native, from San Saba). But in 1966, McMurtry's novel, The Last Picture Show, had been an immersive book that became an award-winning film. The book, and the film adaptation, "conjure small-town loneliness" and show a "particular solitude found in Texas and its people." Any, or preferably, all, of his novels are incredibly readable and realistic, some with a dose of satire to evoke a smile. Pick one and get started.

Elmer Kelton

Why: Kelton grew up near Midland, Texas in the ranching life, and became a news editor who also wrote Westerns, about "bandits, outlaws, romance, and adventure abound in Hard Ride, a collection of tales of the American West." He was a seven-time Spur Award-winning author. But the book that made the most impact on me was not one of his classic Westerns (he wrote more than forty). The one I discovered as I researched Unspoken is now considered Kelton's classic, The Time It Never Rained, an account of the terrible 1950s drought. Though fictional, the book was called "eyewitness literature" by a curator at the Wittliff Collections. "Elmer Kelton was on the front lines when the great drought devastated the land and people he knew intimately. His resulting novel, richly observed and deeply empathetic, stands as the truest, most profound portrait of that era."

Above: Edna Ferber, left; W.F. Strong, right

W.F. Strong

Why: Strong’s Stories from Texas podcast on the Texas Standard takes listeners "into the history and lore that make the state what it is—from exploring well-known legends to uncovering overlooked remnants of the past, to sharing memories of his own." His histories and style are reminiscent of the cowboy poets, and his written stories can be read in two volumes of books published under the same title. Strong's certainly got the credentials to back up his accounts of little-known histories: He's a Fulbright Scholar and currently a professor of Culture and Communication at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and recently joined the Texas Historical Commission board. Listen to his podcast to get a quick soundbite overview of hundreds of Texas events, people, and topics, which might could inspire you to learn more (as it has me), and dig deeper into his two books.
Edna Ferber, who's not from the Lone Star State

Why: Feber wrote a story as large as Texas that became a classic film, Giant, and forever stamped the aura of Texas on the general public. Long before I lived in Texas, I had enjoyed Ferber's novels, and I was mesmerized by the 1956 film based on one. Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean, Giant made Texas larger than life though it was "sharply critical of Texan society." It was a huge boxoffice success and has proved to be enduring.

Discover two more books by Texas authors:

Read Texas by James A. Michener

Though not a native Texan, Michener and his wife lived in Austin, Texas in his later years, perhaps because he'd left a 1985 novel as big as Texas itself, clocking in over 1,000 pages. (The novel was adapted into a three-hour movie in 1994.) During his extensive research for Texas, he lived on Austin's coveted Mt. Bonnell Road with a stunning view of the Colorado River. The Micheners endowed the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin to provide fellowships in fiction, poetry, playwriting and screenwriting. Michener merited a a memorial headstone in Austin's illustrious Texas State Cemetery.

L to R: Texas, James A. Michener, The Borderland, Edwin A. "Bud" Shrake, Jr.

Read The Borderland by Edwin A. "Bud" Shrake, Jr.

A Fort Worth native and lifelong Texan, Shrake was an American journalist, sportswriter, novelist, biographer and screenwriter. His historical novel, The Borderland, was among the first I read about Texas after landing here in 2004, and inspired my now-rabid interest in Texas history. It's an epic novel that "explores the feuds and alliances among Americans, Mexicans, and Indians, the political treachery, and the tales of fortune-hungry settlers that combine to tell the story of how Texas was born." Published in 2000, the book is set in the blossoming frontier town of Austin — the city I chose to relocate to a few years later. Shrake was a larger-than-life character who'd have been at home in one of his own books. In the 60s and 70s, Shrake was part of a “ragtag assemblage” of Texas writers known as Mad Dog Inc., and he went on to turn out many fine novels, short stories, and screenplays with an insider perspective on Texas.