Texans have produced some extraordinary autobiographies which reveal the state as well as their authors. Writers in this study can be read for their literary qualities, for their profound self-revelations, and for their record of the geography and history of a state often considered unique by its citizens and the world in general. A trove of economic, social, and religious practices can be found in the books in this study. The record is perhaps especially interesting now that Texas, which has always seemed a special case to its natives, enters the mainstream of American life. The writers born before 1925--Sallie Reynolds Matthews, John A. Lomax, Gertrude Beasley, Frank Dobie, Hallie Stillwell, Jewel Babb, Annie Mae Hunt, John Houghton Allen, A. C. Greene, William A. Owens and William Humphrey--offer portraits of a traditional Texas, with detail after detail which now seems archaic or on the point of vanishing. These writers make the world of small towns, farms, and ranches vivid for readers bred in cities, and most Americans are urbanites. But these writers also show an awareness of modernity, especially in its urban form. In one way or another, they register the shocks of a transition to the modern world, and a surprising number of them welcome the changes. The oldest writer in this survey, Sallie Reynolds Matthews, who was born in 1861, embraced technological change, though she spent her life in rural and small town settings.

Other autobiographers record growing up in a newer Texas or reveal a Texas outside the traditional Anglo consensus. During the presidential campaign of George W. Bush, when commentators wanted to understand the candidate through his Texas origins, Benjamin Soskis wrote an article, "Why Texas Looks Like America: Lone Star Joining,"¹ for The New Republic on the transformations of Texas that belie its image as a frontier society dominated by petroleum and agriculture. His points would not be news to Texans, but it is interesting to see them made by a Yale graduate from Philadelphia who writes for a left-leaning New York magazine, someone with an outsider's perspective. He points out that "more Texans now work in high tech as work in oil, gas drilling, refining, and agriculture combined" (24). Computer companies have moved into Austin and the Limestone Hills around it on such a scale that the area is sometimes wryly called the Silicon Hills. When William Owens moved to Dallas in 1921, he took his first streetcar ride and saw the black district of Deep Ellum, which he viewed as mysterious. Soskis observes that the internet company, Yahoo, has set up its headquarters in an abandoned warehouse in the district. It is also home to an artistic crowd, one of the hip places to live, with Greenwich Village-style lofts. In Farther Off from Heaven,² William Humphrey describes returning to his hometown of Clarksville after thirty years and discovering that it had ceased to be a southern agricultural center dominated by cotton. He saw cowboy boots and Stetson hats instead of overalls. Cotton farming had been replaced by cattle operations in a move which, he says, reverses Texas history (239). But the new cattle industry had nothing to do with the old style of ranching once so important in Texas: The cattle were produced in feedlot operations. The succession is interesting: open range, closed range, feed lots.

In "Horseman, Hang On: The Reality of Myth in Texas Letters," Craig Clifford has claimed that, "as I see it, Texas can never really be urban, for our urban centers are suffused with rural myths."³ Can future Texas writing be truly urban in its myths? The writers in this book give testimony that it can. Soskis points out that the population of Texas shifted from 80 percent rural in 1940 to 85 percent urban in 2000 (25). Nowadays Texas, he suggests, is more like the rest of America: Texas exceptionalism is in decline. In This Stubborn Soil and its sequel, A Season of Weathering,⁴ William A. Owens has much to say about rural life, but he also looks at Sears Roebuck catalog operations in Dallas and the working of the vast Kress five-and-dime operation as he glimpsed it as a lowly employee in Paris, Texas. Indeed, when he first went with his mother to the little village of Blossom and saw his first train and first electric lights, his mother asked how he liked town and he replied, "More'n anything I ever seen. I wisht I could go back." In his childhood, Paris was a market town, a place where his family took their peanuts. Now it has a number of Fortune 500 companies, including Campbell's Soup and Kimberly Clark, the makers of Pampers. While Mary Karr talks about hunting and fishing in her memoirs, The Liar's Club and Cherry,⁵ she grew up in one of the most industrialized and polluted regions in the world, the refinery strip along the Gulf Coast, and the rural past survives primarily in her father's memories.

The Big Bend ranching country described so well in Hallie Crawford Stillwell's I'll Gather My Geese⁶ might seem impervious to change, but Stillwell became a small-scale industrialist: She and her son supplemented the income of the ranch during a drought by starting a wax-making operation, using "wet labor" and their own candelilla cactus, a fine example of vertical integration in industry, albeit a home industry. She learned to create a media image through radio and television interviews. And she faxed stories about her region to newspapers outside her area. Her ranch is a tourist enterprise with a web site.

Although many of the authors dealt with in this book grew up on farms and ranches or in small towns, the urban world has registered in their writing. Lomax, Dobie, and Owens devoted their careers to documenting the old ways, but only after getting their graduate degrees. Larry McMurtry is an odd case: He says in the foreword to the 1989 reissue of his fine essay collection, In a Narrow Grave,⁷ that he has striven to leave the "mystic plane" of Archer County ranching life behind him for the "metropolis of the muses." In recent years, his "nonautobiographies," Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Roads, and Paradise,⁸ have told the story of a man who moved back to small town life in Archer City, albeit to start the world's largest used-book operation. It has an E-mail address, and McMurtry himself features conspicuously on his town's web site.

Soskis points out that Texas has never been monolithic:

Ironically, Texans have historically promoted their state's cultural uniqueness because of its lack of true unity and cohesion. In the nineteenth century, the legends of the cowboy (appropriated from eighteenth-century northern Mexican folk culture) and the Alamo held together a fragile coalition of five ministates, each with peculiar culture, topography and climate. (The annexation treaty of 1845, which incorporated Texas into the Union, included a provision allowing the state to splinter into those five regions if it chose to do so). (27)

Part of the mystique of Texas exceptionalism rests on this provision, which was meant to permit the formation of four additional slave states. It would be inconceivable for Texans to take advantage of it, but it can serve as a symbol of the diversity of the state. A. C. Greene, one of the most knowledgeable and astute commentators on Texas, collected his newspaper articles on the state in 1998 under the title Sketches from the Five States of Texas⁹ to emphasize the variety within Texas. The five states as Greene sees it are East Texas, South Texas, West Texas, Central Texas, and North Texas. All of them are represented in this book, though it would be mechanical to tie each book to one of Greene's regions, and some areas, like the industrial Gulf Coast and the Trans-Pecos, do not fit into Greene's scheme, which is, after all, a playful device for pointing to diversity. Greene's autobiography, A Personal Country,¹⁰ is a comprehensive study of West Texas, his own region.

A sixth state of Texas, to stretch the scheme for a moment, is the Mexican diaspora, which has no fixed geographical area. A central fact about Texas in the twentieth century was the enormous migration from Mexico, which accelerated during the Revolution of 1910 and continued at varying rates thereafter. As for the twenty-first century, Benjamin Soskis observes that by 2025 Hispanics will have a plurality in the state, relegating the Anglos to second place. Furthermore, the Asian population is steadily growing. Texas has a population of Tejanos, particularly in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, but the majority of Texans of Mexican descent nowadays spring from twentieth-century immigration, and much Chicano literature is marked by that migration. This migrant experience has affinities with the later migrations of Asians and Hispanic groups who have entered the United States, many settling in Texas (Port Arthur has a Vietnamese district), but of course every group has its unique cultural origins and its unique history in America. The Chicano writers included in this book have much to say about the immigrant experience as their parents and grandparents experienced it. Pat Mora, Gloria López-Stafford, and John Phillip Santos are essential reading for anyone interested in the history of immigration to America, a history shot through with ambivalence, tragedy, prejudice, endurance, and success--a fascinating range of stories. Authorities like the Texas Rangers, the Border Patrol, and the Immigration Service (Los Rinches, La Chota, and La Migra) are seen differently by Anglo and Mexican Americans. For Texans of Mexican descent, figures like Francisco Madero, Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa are as important as Bowie and Travis and Houston. South Texans like Juan Cortina (who raided Brownsville in 1859) and Gregorio Cortez (who killed two sheriffs in 1901) can be seen as outlaws or heroes of resistance depending on the side taken. The diaspora of refugees fleeing Villa is dealt with by Pat Mora and John Phillip Santos, who had ancestors in that mass migration. The Mexican American uprising in South Texas in 1915, put down with force by the U.S. Army and the Texas Rangers, has not received such treatment.

Black Texans have created another state of Texas and another diaspora. Their ancestors mostly came to the state as slaves or as ex-slaves who sometimes came with their former masters. At the moment they are not well represented in autobiographies. There are about two million black Texans (and four million Mexican Texans). Dorothy Redus Robinson's The Bell Rings at Four: A Black Teacher's Chronicle of Change, tells the story of her education and her experiences during the integration of Texas schools.¹¹ One of the African-American autobiographies dealt with in this book, I Am Annie Mae,¹² has a wide scope, almost recapitulating black history in Texas. The woman who began as a esperately poor black child proudly made her way in old age to a presidential inauguration. In No Quittin' Sense, the Reverend Charley C. White tells a rich story about life in East Texas.¹³ He worked at every kind of job open to a black laborer and became a respected preacher and therefore a de facto community leader concerned with getting a fair deal for his people, especially from the sheriff's office. He participated in the process of desegregation and conveys a good sense of what it was like to negotiate with the white power structure.

The Native-American population of Texas was decimated in the nineteenth century (the remnants of the Comanches live in Oklahoma), and it is not surprising that there are no autobiographies to represent them. Some of the writers are aware of the genetic contribution: Native ancestry is mentioned by Jewel Babb, Annie Mae Hunt, C. C. White, William Humphrey, Larry McMurtry, and Mary Karr. William Owens had no native ancestry, but his Aunt Julie was half Choctaw and he presents an interesting child's-eye view of her: He sensed that she was culturally different, and he could not perceive her as talking like "kinfolks" or acting like them.

It is probably the sense of place which makes Texas autobiographies most distinctive, for all the diversity of the state. Dave Oliphant's Memories of Texas Towns & Cities¹⁴ is a collection of poems and falls outside the scope of this book, but it is noteworthy for its approach to autobiography through descriptions of cities and towns where the author has lived. The long poem on Austin is a particularly rich exploration of the history and ambiance of the capital. A. C. Greene overtly focuses on his region as a means of explaining himself, as does Larry McMurtry in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Even writers who do not foreground their home territory in this way have a strong feeling for regionalism, an acute awareness of local history and conditions. J. Frank Dobie in Some Part of Myself¹⁵ and John Houghton Allen in Southwest¹⁶ identify strongly with a particular spot of land: their querencias, their beloved spots. Allen alone among authors in this book is dominated by nostalgia, and he burns with contempt for the modern world of oil drilling and the welfare system. For Pat Mora, The House of Houses¹⁷ of her title is both her family's at 714 Mesita and an ideal house of words in the desert near El Paso which serves as a kind Platonic ideal of the querencia, one located in the imagination rather than in a place. Gloria López-Stafford's A Place in El Paso records a quest for a different kind of place, a social space in which she can reconcile her multiple identity as the child of an Anglo father and Mexican mother.¹⁸

West Texas is probably the region best served by Texas autobiographers, although northeast Texas produced William A. Owens and William Humphrey, writers born only a few miles apart. Hallie Stillwell and Jewel Babb chronicle life in the Trans-Pecos in the far west, and J. Frank Dobie and John Houghton Allen reminisce about the Brush Country of the Trans-Nueces. West Texas is the region which in many ways defined Texas for Texans through the Comanche Wars, a point made by A. C. Greene. It is also a region where the oil and cattle industries, definitions of Texas for outsiders, have dominated the economy. The early days were recorded by Sallie Reynolds Matthews, who endured the wars with the Comanches, the Civil War, the introduction of the railroad, the closing of the open range made inevitable by barbed wire (which her father-in-law, Joseph Beck Matthews, introduced to the region), the settling and abandoning of communities like Fort Griffin, and the formation of a progressive settled community around Albany. The West Texans in her Interwoven¹⁹ are generous, hard working, eager for knowledge and very different from the shiftless people in Gertude Beasley's powerful family memoir, My First Thirty Years.²⁰ Beasley's kin are presented as lazy, antagonistic to learning, and given to incest and bestiality, and her family makes a dramatic contrast with the Matthews and Reynolds families, though Interwoven suppresses some painful conflicts, including the lynching of her brother-in-law, John Larn. Beasley regards the respectable people of Abilene with the suspicion of a Young Goodman Brown looking gloomily at the worthies of Salem. A. C. Greene, born in Abilene about a decade after Beasley left, calls it the "Village of My Heart" and sees virtue as well as toughness in the people. Greene and Larry McMurtry consider the past but also take in the present. Greene recognized the importance of the highway in modern Texas (the state has an overweening pride in its roads) and his autobiography explores his state of West Texas from a Volkswagen camper. McMurtry expresses some guilt over abandoning ranch life while setting out to turn Archer City, site of three films growing out of his works, into a town of bookstores. McMurtry's story is a paradigm of change in Texas.

The Brush Country is a fine example of the ways in which human settlement reshapes the landscape. This region between the Nueces and the Rio Grande has a distinctive vegetation, mostly thorny, but it was created late in the nineteenth century when overgrazing destroyed the prairie grasses which covered the area. Dobie and Allen show no awareness of this process. Pat Mora, influenced by ecological awareness, brings that awareness into her work when she writes about the Chihuahuan desert around El Paso. For John Phillip Santos, the desert and mountains of Coahuila, whence came his paternal ancestors, are a landscape offering visionary experience: They are his Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation.²¹ Texas not only borders on Coahuila, it was once part of it: We could think of it whimsically as Upper Coahuila, just as the comic novelist Dan Jenkins calls Texas "Baja Oklahoma."

People do more than contemplate landscape: They work in it. Readers of Texas autobiographies can learn a great deal about cattle ranching from Sally Reynolds Matthews, John Houghton Allen, and Hallie Stillwell, about goat ranching from Jewel Babb, about red-dirt farming from William Owens, about tenant farming and small-town life from William Humphrey, about the oil-drilling business from A. C. Greene, and about life in a refinery town from Mary Karr. These books preserve a body of material practices and customs. Anyone wanting to know how to go through a barbed-wire fence can learn the technique from Beasley and Greene. Owens preserves many vanished practices of poor white farmers in Northeast Texas. Pat Mora likes to describe the making of Mexican herbal remedies and potpourri. No fewer than five of the authors in this book record the making of lye soap. Three of them--Matthews, Owens, and Babb--describe times when it was necessary to make one's own soap. A. C. Greene's great-grandmother, on the other hand, made lye soap when she was weary of the modern world and craved the old ways. Pat Mora describes the soap making in a special context: One of her long dead ancestors prepares it in Mora's imaginary House of Houses, where all the generations of her family can meet in the writer's imagination and share experiences and skills. The books by Chicano writers are especially interesting for their preservation of lore not known in the cultural mainstream, like the importance of the curandero or curandera, the herb doctor. Jewel Babb, the coauthor of Desert Healing Woman,²² was a traditional healer in the Appalachian manner, relying on the laying on of hands, and she was also seen as a curandera by the local Mexican population from both sides of the border in Hudspeth County.

Cultural practices are described in rich detail: A student of southern Protestantism can learn a great deal by comparing the various revivals in the early books--the Presbyterian "cowboy camp meeting" at Fort Davis in Sallie Reynolds Matthews's Interwoven; the Methodist camp meeting under a brush arbor in John Lomax's Adventures of a Ballad Hunter;²³ and the Baptist camp meetings and town revivals in Owens's This Stubborn Soil and A Season of Weathering. Charley C. White, a black preacher in the Church of God in Christ, describes his spiritual struggle as he moved from being a Baptist to a Pentecostal. His description of one of his visions is superb: "When God gives you a vision your whole body kind of soaks up the message, like a biscuit soaks up red-eye gravy" (134). Gertrude Beasley reports rather caustically on the work of the missionary Baptists, and she describes the fervid atmosphere of their religious revivals which she contrasts with the restrained legalism of the Church of Christ.

In the works of the Chicano autobiographers, popular Catholicism is interwoven with the narratives in a way that may seem exotic to Anglo readers. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a recurrent figure: She makes a fantasy appearance in Pat Mora's House of Houses, and her miraculous cloak is glimpsed from a moving sidewalk in Mexico City in John Phillip Santos's Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa points out that the key symbolic figures in Chicana writers are three madres: the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose appearance to the Indian Juan Diego in 1535 near Mexico City created a symbolic union of Catholicism and indigenous religion; La Llorona, or "The Weeping Woman," a ghostly figure who appears near water weeping for her drowned children; and Malinche, the Indian woman who served as interpreter for the conquerors of Mexico.²⁴ López-Stafford was terrified by the legend of La Llorona in her childhood, and Santos meditates on the meaning of Malinche in Mexican culture. Mora's book is a treasury of saints' days and festivals, with a wealth of material from the liturgical year. All of the Chicano authors herein make use of El Día de los Muertos, "The Day of the Dead," the unique Mexican practice of communing with the dead in the cemetery on November 2, All Souls' Day. In the writings of López-Stafford and Ray Gonzalez²⁵ the practice is mentioned in passing, but it is important in the commemorative vision of Pat Mora and John Phillip Santos.

Education is a key social practice. In Texas, the drive toward education was sometimes the instinct of the community, as in the West Texas ranching country on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River. Sallie Reynolds Matthews frequently emphasizes her family's concern for education in Interwoven. Gertrude Beasley, who was a remarkably successful schoolteacher at seventeen, has much to say about the violent and authoritarian atmosphere in Texas schools and her own complicity in it in spite of her socialist principles. Her methods included carrying a two-and-a-half-foot strap to school and even in one case teaching with a revolver on her desk. Beasley's own education reveals much about the curriculum and methods of teaching from the primary grades through the university level. William A. Owens describes his region of Northeast Texas as a world with little interest in education, but he struggled to get a teaching certificate: The thought of not getting an education was devastating to him. His first two autobiographies constitute a full and often dismal picture of impoverished public education in rural and small-town Texas in the early twentieth century, and he meticulously describes his preparatory training at the East Texas Normal School at Commerce. J. Frank Dobie and John Lomax first attended small sectarian universities where the staff had too much work and too little equipment, but they sought a better education in the East: Lomax at Harvard, Dobie at Columbia University. And both were victims of political infighting at the University of Texas. Unfortunately, neither says as much as a reader might like about the traumas of being fired by the university. For so many years education appeared to be the key to success in America, and some of these memoirs are Horatio Alger stories in which schooling plays the part of the wealthy benefactor.

Along with major institutions like religion and education, most of these books examine the texture of daily life, its customs, pastimes, and folklore. The three famous folklorists--John Lomax, William A. Owens, and J. Frank Dobie--were especially attuned to folkways. Sally Reynolds Matthews describes archaic practices like "infares" after weddings and pseudo-medieval tournaments in West Texas. Lomax and Dobie recorded tournaments as well, and Chicano writers describe Mexican customs generally unknown to the Anglo majority--like the grito of freedom on the Diez y seis de Septiembre.

Racism is a social practice rooted in the Texas past. The Texas Revolution was fought in part over the desire of southern American colonists to retain slavery after it was banned by the Mexican constitution. Chicanos have bitter memories of racial relations in Texas. They dissent from the traditional view of Texas that was popular among the Anglo majority, for whom San Jacinto and the Alamo were sacred. Ron Rozelle's Into that Good Night, set in Oakwood, an ordinary town in East Texas not too far from Reverend Charles White's Jacksonville, describes the entire Anglo school, all twelve grades, being taken to the town of Buffalo to see John Wayne's film, The Alamo.²⁶ Rozelle's book does not receive substantial treatment here because it is more an account of his father's descent into Alzheimer's than an autobiography, but he does preserve the ambiance of an East Texas town on the verge of desegregation. Santos and López-Stafford have narrated their memories of being subjected to aggressive Anglo history in school, and Ray Gonzalez recalls throwing off the cult of Davy Crockett. He dramatizes the problems of being Mexican in El Paso, where the Border Patrol looks suspiciously at anyone walking near the border who might be racially profiled as an illegal alien. Curiously, the strongest emotional attachments felt by Dobie and Allen in their youth were to vaqueros on their fathers' ranches who offered emotional warmth they did not receive from the fathers. For Hallie Stillwell, Mexican laborers, "wet" or dry, are a financial matter. She is not hostile but not especially empathetic.

William Owens writes a devastating mea culpa about his complacent racism as a child. Reverend White and Annie Mae Hunt show what it was like to be the victim of racism. A desire to record the brutalities visited on her family on a Navasota plantation was the impetus for her narrative. Gertrude Beasley is particularly interesting because she tells what happened when a young woman of socialist leanings and an unexamined set of racial attitudes went north to the University of Chicago in 1914. She learned that her prejudices earned her the nickname, "Lyncher." Like J. Frank Dobie at Columbia University the year before, she quickly learned to reassess her racial attitudes.

Naturally we read autobiographies to learn about the human being created for us in them, as well as for social and cultural background. In a work which does not quite qualify as memoir, Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land, John Graves discusses the "individualistic Southern yeoman" as a Texas type, Scotch-Irish or Scottish in extraction. He devotes a whole chapter to a typical "Old Fart, ornery, independent, holding onto a little land at the edge of suburb."²⁷ Texas autobiographies abound in "originals," as Dobie would call them--distinctive and strong-minded people.²⁸ Readers of southern fiction and autobiography are familiar with such characters; the South seems tolerant of colorful eccentricity. Stillwell, Dobie, Lomax, Allen, Beasley, Humphrey and Karr are tough, opinionated people with a strong sense of self. Annie Mae Hunt and the Reverend C. C. White show that such rugged selves are not limited to the Anglo world. Several writers became celebrities on the basis of their highly visible personalities: They were, to use another term from Dobie, "out of the old rock," and they became good copy for journalists. Dobie, Stillwell, and Hunt are good examples of older "originals," and now Mary Karr dines out, literally and figuratively, on the story of her becoming a tough individual in the Port Arthur area.

The terminology for classifying autobiographies is now very loose. As L. L. Langness and Gelya Frank point out in their book on anthropology and autobiography, the old distinction between the confession and the memoir has disappeared.²⁹ At one time the narrative stressing the inner life was called a confession, while memoir denoted an account of public events. Sallie Reynolds Matthews writes a memoir in this sense: She seems uncomfortable discussing her inner life and emotions; hence she gives us a family chronicle stressing marriages, deaths, trail drives, and social change. The "memoir boom" of the 1990s, which Mary Karr helped to create, was an outpouring of confessional narratives, stories of dysfunctional families and even incest. The terms "autobiography," "confession," and "memoir" are used interchangeably in this book. Two memoirs, the lives of Charley C. White and Annie Mae Hunt, are not normal autobiographies but compilations from taped interviews, while the memoir of Jewel Babb is a combination of taped interviews and materials written by Babb.

While generic terms are unstable, theoretical discussions of autobiography have become elaborate. James Olney's influential study, Metaphors of Self,³⁰ appeared in 1972; Olney's fruitful suggestion was that autobiographers create a self rather than merely record their lives. They search for and create meaningful patterns in their lives, patterns which he calls metaphors, using the term in a very broad sense. In a celebrated letter to his brother and sister-in-law, John Keats called the world a "vale of Soul-making." Memoirists are concerned with conveying just how they made their souls. Some can even define when it happened: for William Humphrey, it was the death of his father and his departure from tiny Clarksville for a new life in Dallas; for Annie Mae Hunt, it was the moment when she decided never to clean houses again. William A. Owens records the time that he first saw and drank from the waters of the Red River and knew he would be changed by the experience.

Paul John Eakin has extended Olney's ideas in helpful ways. Eakin's Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in Self-Invention (1985)³¹ eloquently puts the case for seeing autobiography not as a factual transcription of a life (though the work will be rooted in that life) but as a storytelling process which helps to create the self. We come to know ourselves by telling our stories. Olney's Wordsworthian formula, often repeated, is that we "half discover, half create" the self. The task of the reader is not to seek empirical verification of what is told (and we hardly ever do that) but to understand the process. Of course, obvious lies and evidence of bad faith must be considered. "Fictions of self" is probably a superior term to "metaphors of self" but may carry the suggestion that the autobiography is somehow false.

The richness of the self-portrait can be troubling to readers who wonder if the details of the life can actually be remembered accurately. This has been the case for Mary Karr, whose apparent ability to re-create elaborate conversations from the past has been questioned by some reviewers. Barrett J. Mandel's "Full of Life Now" expresses the contemporary feeling about autobiography and truth:

Readers turn to autobiography to satisfy a need for verifying a fellow human being's experience of reality. They achieve satisfaction when they feel strongly that the book is true to the experience of the author and when they are aware, to a lesser degree, that the book is an achievement of literary construction, making use of pretense as a way of highlighting its opposite, reality.³²

Mary Karr's first memoir, significantly called The Liar's Club, re-creates a traumatic event which happened when she was seven years old, an event which she could not remember clearly for years. This is an objection which could be made to any number of autobiographies. Gertrude Beasley's memory of being sexually assaulted by her older brother at the age of four has a claim to accuracy because such a memory is likely to be horrifically indelible. She assures us of her desire to tell the truth by providing examples of cases in which her memory was not distinct or accurate. Mandel observes that "autobiography forges present meaning into the marrow of one's remembered life" (64). His use of "forged" is superbly ambiguous. He observes that real lying in autobiography, as opposed to taking the freedom to re-create events in a plausible manner, is usually found out: The manipulation can be sensed. Mandel's feeling is that "most autobiographer are honest (that's the whole point of the genre) with occasional distortion, honest evasions, discrete pockets of non-communication"³³ The "fiction of self" could be defined as an interpretation of self.

Memory is selective, certainly. Sometimes the text omits things that the autobiographer remembers very well. The omissions are often highly significant but the reader is not aware of them unless perhaps the writer is so notorious or celebrated that the oversight is obvious. This study will identify some important omissions in the autobiographies of Sallie Reynolds Matthews and John A. Lomax. Hallie Stillwell's omissions, her sightings of the Marfa lights, and her husband's alleged knowledge of the whereabouts of the famous "Lost Nigger Mine," are quite understandable: UFO hunters are probably more annoying even than seekers of lost treasures. J. Frank Dobie, who first described the lore around the mine and the Stillwell family's involvement in it, was pestered by treasure hunters, but he could put them in his books.

Several Texas autobiographers are best approached by tracing the metaphors of self (or fictions of self) which they are trying to forge, as Mandel would say, through their narratives. John Houghton Allen sees his defining trait as coraje, a Spanish term used in the Brush Country of South Texas to describe an irritable, restless quality, what the archaic term "spleen," which dropped out of use in English in the eighteenth century, meant. J. Frank Dobie's autobiographical essays (he did not live to finish an entire book about himself) define him as a lover of freedom, a man passionate about storytelling, and an academic who preferred storytellers to professors. Hallie Stillwell conceives of herself as the tenderfoot who would meet challenges set over a long marriage by her rancher husband, whose teaching method was to refuse to teach her anything so that she could fail and learn by bitter experience. The rugged individuals are often the people who had to work hardest to create a strong sense of self. Gertrude Beasley traces her course from terrified child to secretive young woman to tough schoolteacher and confident intellectual. Unfortunately, her last known utterance was a paranoid letter pointing to a collapse in her hard-won assurance. J. Frank Dobie mentions two periods when he lost his sense of self, his periods in New York City and in army training camps. Unfortunately, he says too little about them. Larry McMurtry, on the other hand, suffered a deep loss of self after a heart bypass operation, and that experience has been a theme in his autobiographical explorations.

Confessional writers like William Humphrey and Mary Karr see their lives through the wounds, literal or emotional, received in their childhood. Humphrey would grow up to be the child observer turned storyteller, the man who would turn conflicts, especially Oedipal ones, into art in his novels and stories. Karr defines herself in her first memoir as the scarred survivor who has grown tough in the Darwinian world of an oppressive Gulf Coast society and a family torn by conflict and poisoned by a secret. In her second book, she less convincingly ends with a paradoxical notion that she has achieved an understanding that she is "Same Self," an identity which manages to be enduring and yet constantly changing.

The self is so important in American life (the self has inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, after all) that we can easily forget that the individual is nurtured in a context, primarily the family. For the confessional writer, the family is important primarily in relation to the writer: "this is what I suffered, this is what they made me become, this is how I remade myself in spite of my profound wounds." Most of the autobiographies in this study emphasize family, even extended family, the clan. This is probably to be expected in a selection of writers who represent southern and Mexican cultures, which tend to be family oriented. Texas may seem a distinct society, thanks to its special history, but the original Anglo Texans were mostly southerners, and one characteristic of the region is a deep concern with family and family history, as readers of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and other novelists know. Most of the Anglo writers in this book were born into families which arrived in Texas from the Deep South, most often from Alabama and Mississippi. Mexican-American writers also show a strong sense of family.

Some of the most exciting current thinking about autobiography in America today explores what Paul John Eakin calls "the relational life," which is a major subject of his most recent book, How Our Lives Become Stories. He believes that "relational lives represent the most prominent form of life writing in the United States today."³⁴ Texas writers like Sallie Matthews Reynolds are in fact pioneers of relational autobiography. Matthews chose her title, Interwoven, to convey the subject of her book, the intermarriages of the two pioneering families included in her name, a metaphor of family rather than a metaphor of self: She subordinates herself to the intertwined history of the Reynolds and Matthews families. A. C. Greene, William Humphrey, William A. Owens, Pat Mora, and John Phillip Santos offer excellent examples of relational lives.

An insight from anthropological folklore illuminates a number of these family-centered works. Texas folklore draws on southern, western, and Mexican sources and has produced at least five important folklorists: John A. Lomax, J. Frank Dobie, William A. Owens, Mody Boatright, and Américo Paredes. Perhaps the most important unwritten memoir in Texas is the life of Américo Paredes, who helped create Chicano/a literature in his brilliant book, With His Pistol in His Hand.³⁵

In "Memories That Never Were: Katherine Anne Porter and the Family Saga,"³⁶ Sylvia Grider, a specialist in anthropological folklore at Texas A & M, explains the use of autobiography in Porter's fiction through Mody Boatright's theory of the family saga. It seems even more natural to apply it to genuine autobiographies than to autobiographical fiction. Mody Boatright formulated the concept in an essay called "The Family Saga as a Form of Folklore." This brief but suggestive work was collected in 1958 with essays by two other writers in The Family Saga and Other Phases of American Folklore.³⁷ Boatright was closely associated with J. Frank Dobie (who got him started in the collection of folk materials), and both were mainstays of The Texas Folklore Society, although Dobie remained a campfire folklorist, a collector and reteller of stories, while Boatright took a more scientific approach.

The best discussion of Boatright's life and thought appears in James McNutt's fine dissertation from the University of Texas, Beyond Regionalism: Texas Folklorists and the Emergence of a Post-Regional Consciousness.³⁸ A good biographical sketch appears in "Mody Coggin Boatright," an essay by Ernest B. Speck in The Handbook of Texas Online.³⁹ Boatright took a more scientific view of folklore than J. Frank Dobie, who had persuaded him to join the Texas Folklore Society. Boatright was one of the mentors of the great South Texas folklorist, Américo Paredes, and arranged a research assistantship for him to do field work.

Boatright is interested in the way families pass down stories from generation to generation. They are not passed down as folklore but as authentic accounts of the past. The stories may be true, but they still tend to take certain traditional forms: the explanation of how the family lost its money or failed to strike it rich. the adventures of the early settlers, the tales of lost mines. They usually survive because they embody a social value. Such stories can be found in a number of the autobiographies in this book, especially those which take in the family's arrival in Texas. Sandra K. Stahl, who is probably the most important current advocate of applying anthropological concepts to autobiographies, endorses Boatright's ideas but dislikes the term "family saga," feeling that it implies a more connected narrative than oral tradition normally transmits. However, her alternative, "family story," is a broad and ambiguous term.⁴⁰ "Family saga" at least avoids the ambiguity.

The family sagas in Sallie Reynolds Matthews, J. Frank Dobie, Hallie Stillwell, William Owens, A. C. Greene, Jewel Babb, Annie Mae Hunt, and William Humphrey will receive much attention here. These writers are in touch with nineteenth-century Texas. In an interesting recapitulation of the pattern, Pat Mora and John Phillip Santos preserve family sagas as well, stories of Mexico before the Revolution of 1910 and of the ways that ancestors came to Texas during it. No doubt other groups will eventually preserve their own narratives of migration, among them the Vietnamese and other groups from the Orient.

The future is interesting to speculate, but the question of where to begin a study of the subject is more important. In his recent collection of essays, State of Mind: Texas Literature and Culture, Tom Pilkington speaks of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca as an originator of Texas writing.⁴¹ He is not entirely serious, but certainly Cabeza de Vaca and three other survivors of a disastrous Spanish expedition to Florida in 1527 were the first Caucasians to cross Texas, and de Vaca left a kind of spiritual autobiography of a conquistador who learned to value the humanity of Native Americans. He became a healer at the insistence of the tribes who passed him and his companions on from group to group. He eventually came through the Trans-Pecos region around 1535. The Spaniard was an odd precursor of Jewel Babb, the reluctant healer of Indian Hot Springs in the same desert area, or perhaps it would be better to call her his odd successor. But it would be whimsical to consider de Vaca's fascinating Relación the first Texas autobiography. Texas did not yet exist, and de Vaca only passed through the region.

The first true autobiography in Texas was Memoirs of Mary A. Maverick, written up from diaries in 1880, privately printed in 1895, and finally published by the Alamo Printing Company in 1921.⁴² Mary A. Maverick (1818-1898) grew up on a plantation near Tuscaloosa and married Samuel Maverick, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, in 1837. He took her to Texas in December of that year, in a party which included their ten slaves. The journey was hard: Two of their horses froze to death in one of those storms she learned to call by the Texas name, "norther." She describes an encounter with a party of Tonkawa Indians. Some of them beckoned at her buggy window for her to let them hold her five-month-old son. She declined, having heard they were cannibals, and let them see her pistol and Bowie knife: Maverick is a forerunner of bold women like Hallie Stillwell and Gertrude Beasley. Not all plantation women were southern belles, it seems, though she seems not to have known that the Tonkawas were loyal allies of Anglos against the Comanches. Her life in San Antonio included witnessing Indian raids and meeting a number of colorful eccentrics that J. Frank Dobie would have prized. Her activities as president of the Alamo Monument Association generated interest in preserving the ruins of the building as a historical site. She painted a watercolor of the ruined Alamo which has considerable historical interest. She was also a prominent member of the Daughters of the Texas Revolution and one of the organizers of the Battle of the Flowers, a festival which commemorates the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto: In short, as Paula Marks observes, she was one of the founders and guardians of the Anglo-Texas view of history.⁴³ Her book, which extends only to 1859, falls outside the scope of this study, which concerns itself with relatively modern works, especially ones which record a shift from a rural or small town world to an urban one. A

nother interesting book excluded from full treatment here is Amelia E. Barr's All the Days of My Life,⁴⁴ published in 1913. Barr (1839-1919), author of an historical novel, Remember the Alamo! (1888), devotes a little over a hundred pages out of five hundred to Austin and Galveston. She was an Englishwoman from Ulveston, Lancashire, who came to Texas in 1856 with her Scottish husband, Robert Barr. He worked as a state auditor in Austin. The years before the Civil War were, she says, the happiest of her life. She provides an excellent portrait of life in Austin during the period, with interesting observations of the mores of Texas women. She admired their independence and beauty. Capable of running their farms and ranches, many were crack shots and good riders: She anticipates Hallie Stillwell rather nicely. Mary Maverick's willingness to show her weapons was not a freak. Barr noted with some dismay the widespread use of snuff, a substance not unknown among Texas women in the early twentieth century. Perhaps her finest anecdote is the account of an old Indian fighter who mysteriously grew a new set of teeth in his late eighties. His wife complained that he became bad-tempered when teething, although in the past he had come home once with a Comanche arrow in his back--feathers still attached--and hadn't complained. Texas makes folklorists of everyone, it seems, including English gentlewomen. After her husband and three sons died of yellow fever in 1866, she moved to New York. Like Mary Maverick, she coped with deaths in the family by turning to spiritualism.

Barr was also a racist, and her book is afflicted with a series of stories about lazy and superstitious slaves. A better start for a consideration of Texas autobiography is Sallie Reynolds Matthews's Interwoven, which rather appropriately appeared in 1936, the centennial of Texas independence. Matthews was born during the Civil War and witnessed the transformation of her West Texas from the Comanche frontier to a region in touch with the outside world through modern communications, change which she celebrates in her preface. She ended her narrative just before the start of the twentieth century, with the birth of her son, Watt, in 1899, but she contemplates the twentieth century with pleasure, speaking with approval of radio and aviation. She describes the past for her grandchildren while looking to the future, and we are that future.

Excerpt from This Stubborn Self: Texas Autobiographies, 1925-2001 Copyright © 2002 by Bert Almon. No portion of this excerpt may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, Texas Christian University Press.