Texas history: On second thought, make that 60 essential books about our state

A little over a year ago — for Texas Independence Week — a former newsroom colleague, Dave Thomas, and I compiled a list of the 53 best books about Texas.

A year later, I stand by every title on this list.

We also urged readers to respond. They immediately sent along tips, questions and suggestions, along with some understandably strong feelings.

The most common query: “What about James Michener?”

Here’s what I wrote at the time: James Michener, the prolific and bestselling novelist who lived and worked in Austin before he died in 1997, wrote a serious doorstopper, “Texas,” in 1985. Readers wondered why the 1,472-page epic that spanned more than four centuries of historical fiction wasn’t one of our choices.

I had admired Michener’s early novels, but I could not in good conscience recommend “Texas,” which felt to me overlong, stale and lugubrious.

Now, one problem with our survey is that we chose only one title by each author.

On our list, for instance, we heartily recommended books by John Graves, Horton Foote, Larry McMurtry, Don Graham and Stephen Harrigan, but some readers preferred different titles by the same writers: “Hard Scrabble” (Graves); “Harrison, Texas” (Foote); “Last Picture Show” (McMurtry); “Lone Star Literature” (Graham); and “Remember Ben Clayton” (Harrigan).

We looked closely at Dan Jenkins’ irreverent novels, but, for various reasons, didn’t settle on one for our list. Jim Dyer suggests “Baja Oklahoma.” “He is one of the great sportswriters of all time,” Dyers writes, “and his description of the UT-Arkansas battle for the national championship in Sports Illustrated is a classic of sports journalism.”

Bud Shrake, another Sports Illustrated alum, received many reader votes for “Blessed McGill.”

The omission, however, that I immediately regretted, was Willie Morris’ “North Toward Home,” which offers much insight about the University of Texas in the 1950s and complements Billy Lee Brammer’s “The Gay Place,” which is about roughly the same period in Austin.

One book I wanted for the list even after it was too late to add: Nate Blakeslee’s “Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town.” An investigative report into a corrupt drug investigation that led to 39 people arrested and charged with dealing cocaine, it rightly won the Texas Institute of Letters best book of nonfiction prize.

More recently, I devoured Blakeslee’s “American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West,” which takes place in and around Yellowstone Park, not Texas, but what a tale!

I devoted a recent Think, Texas column to books about the resilient women of early Texas. Readers suggested dozens of titles. One I can heartily endorse: Elizabeth Crook’s recent novel “The Which Way Tree,” a searing story about a girl in Central Texas tracking down the panther that killed her mother and disfigured the girl’s face.

In another column, I wrote about a recent, scintillating read that didn’t make the 2019 list: Noah Smithwick’s “The Evolution of a State: Recollections of Old Texas Days.” We’ve browsed through countless first-person memoirs about pioneer days; this one is especially spellbinding and covers a lot of ground in East, Central and West Texas.

Recently, I have praised Stephen L. Davis’ “The Essential J. Frank Dobie,” part of a literary rescue operation of “Mr. Texas” by the literary curator for the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos. Think, Texas published two excerpts: One on Dobie’s friendship with legendary cattleman Charles Goodnight and another on the tempos of the Southwest.

Davis was represented on the 2019 list by his “Texas Literary Outlaws.”

In this column, we also published excerpts from Michael Corcoran’s “Ghost Notes: Pioneering Spirits of Texas Music” and John A. Lomax’s “Adventures of a Ballad Hunter.” While I enjoyed dipping back into Lomax’s writing, I haven’t been able to read “Ghost Notes” yet because the review copy is likely sitting in our newsroom and I am working from home.

Yet Corcoran’s earlier book, “All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music,” made the cut on the 2019 list.

I’ve been lucky enough to revisit two volumes that made that Texas Independence Week list since it came out: Fred Gipson’s “Old Yeller” and Alan Lessoff’s “Where Texas Meets the Sea.” They held up very well and sparked plenty of reader comment when I shared my fresh thoughts about them in these pages.

Stephen Harrigan’s magnificent “Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas” came out after the list was published. Here’s what I wrote when it was published in the fall: “Because it is so well told and because it embraces so much of the state’s charms and contradictions, ‘Big Wonderful Thing’ is likely to define popular Texas history for the general reader for at least a generation to come.”

Last year, we had lauded his earlier “The Gates of the Alamo,” but Harrigan could qualify for any number of works.

On the recommendation of reader Elizabeth Jones, I now must re-read “Hurrah for Texas, the Diary of Adolphus Sterne 1838-1851,” which I mined for his entertaining descriptions 35 years ago in graduate school. Jones recently picked Sterne up again and heartily advocated for this precious bit of early Texas.

Also high on my reading list: Anything by Oscar Cásares, the Austin author who recently named a Guggenheim Fellow. Ordering “Brownsville,” “Amigoland” and “Where We Come From” for front-porch delivery.

I’d like to add Jeff Kerr’s essential “Seat of Empire: The Embattled Birth of Austin, Texas” and Ken Roberts’ excellent “The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing” to the list, now that I think about them. I don’t recall why they did not make the cut in 2019, most likely because we didn’t want the list to be too Austin-centric.

Speaking of which, Davis from the Wittliff Collections shared with me a passing observation that El Paso, not Austin, might be the true literary capital of the state. If so, I have a lot of pleasurable reading ahead of me.

The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly and Texas Highways have all published credible lists, which indicate I have even more reading to do.

So, let’s see, if I add Kerr, Lessoff, Roberts, Smithwick, Blakeslee and Crook to the ballot, then we have a total of 59 books about Texas by authors I’d fight for any day.

No, make it 60. How could I leave out the Texas State Historical Association’s encyclopedic “The Handbook of Texas,” which is available in a constantly updated version online, but also has long graced our bookshelves in the sturdy, handsome 1996 “New Handbook of Texas” edition?

I suspect that the list will grow.

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