Reared in isolation by her father on the Western prairie, Mary Dove has been taught to fear only one thing. One sparkling October day it happens. The inevitable stranger rides in off the plains, and...
As enigmatic and contradictory as far West Texas has always been, it is nevertheless surprising to learn that in 1925 its desert germinated a slender but vibrant shoot of the Harlem Renaissance. Isolated...
Al Jennings, if we are to believe him, was for several years a close friend of O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), perhaps America’s favorite short-story writer. They met, Jennings claims, as outlaws...
Against the flamboyant background of the “Golden Spread,” the oil-rich Panhandle of the late 1950s, Al Dewlen has poised a full-scale and truly original novel of one Texas family—the Mungers of Amarillo. The six Munger siblings are the heirs of hard-drinking, hardscrabble farmer Cecil Munger, who in one generation brought his family from Dust Bowl poverty to unfathomable wealth. Wayward humor, warmth and passion, vigorous and imaginative revelation silhouette their individual rebelliousness against the debilitating restrictions of the family empire.
Quincie, the motherless thirteen-year-old daughter of an itinerant muleskinner, is the captivating protagonist of this Depression-era novel set in the Texas oil patch. Her story’s value resides not...
Of the canyons that break the eastern edge of the Staked Plains, Palo Duro is by far the most spectacular. As one approaches the edge, the earth opens up into a vast gash, a geological and ecological...
In 1909, former frontier judge and editor Edgar Rye introduced The Quirt and the Spur: Vanishing Shadows of the Texas Frontier to a reading public hungry for stories of this vanishing world. Drawing...
I and Claudie is a delightful and captivating novel about a couple of bungling but good-hearted con men who (barely) make their way across Texas over a two-year period in the 1930s. Their adventures,...
A Double Mountain Books classic reissue, this storybook travelogue covers the big ranches of West and South Texas. Williams made many informal excursions to study their history, founders, and owners, picking up facts, folklore, and range gossip along the way. He documents the fifteen largest ranches in Texas and the ways they adapted to changing conditions in the ranching industry. Photographs and maps illustrate the text. Though it never received wide circulation following its publication in 1954, The Big Ranch Country has been recognized as a standard work by ranch historians. J. W. Williams wrote often in books and newspapers about West Texas, and his work is still cited by authors and scholars.
"An outstanding contribution to the historiography of the American West and likely will remain for a long time the definitive work on the Texas Panhandle."—Ernest Wallace "As one born in the region,...
