Coping
“The hell with it,” said the seventeenth-century specialist. “I spent nine years working on a PhD and fifteen years making full professor and here I am shoveling rocks out of a ditch. I’m moving back...
View ArticleOf Bees and Men
Illustrated by Tom BallengerPeople who have had occasion to know honeybees tend to have strong feelings about them, though such occasions are growing rarer in a mainly urban world. As often as not, the...
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Meat
At bottom human existence is and ever has been quite gory, even if you leave out wars and feuds and duels and murders and other forms of intra-species violence. The main shed blood has been that of...
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Ol’ Blue
One cool, still Friday night last March, when the bitterest winter in decades was starting to slack its grip and the first few chuck-will’s-widows were whistling tentative claims to nest territories,...
View ArticleAll That Litters
Illustrated by Tom Curry.When a personal habit or attitude starts showing up with fair regularity in your dreams, I suppose you have to consider it ingrained for better or worse. Not long ago, after a...
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Drinking
Maybe there exists somewhere a satisfying historical account of ethyl alcohol in relation to human beings, but if so I haven’t seen it, and I’ve read a few attempts. My interest in the subject, I’d...
View ArticleRunning With the Big Dogs
From Fred Gipson’s fictional Old Yeller to A&M mascot Reveille and Lyndon Johnson’s beleaguered beagles, dogs have always reigned as Texans’ pets of choice. The long line of distinguished dog...
View ArticleStream of Consciousness
In 1957 John Graves — World War II veteran, onetime expatriate, and TCU professor — put a canoe into the waters of the upper Brazos River for one last look before it was to be dammed. He took a dog...
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Body of Work
IT’S REALLY NOT SO STRANGE that the star of the Southwestern Writers Collection is the simulacrum of a one-legged body taken from the set of a television show. First, the fictional character who...
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Great Guns
I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE National Rifle Association, nor do I collect rare firearms, attend gun shows, or subscribe to gun magazines. I am not, in other words, a “gun nut” and, in fact, can sympathize...
View ArticleThe Uncertain Sage
A cool, brilliantly blue day in early February found me driving north from Austin on a sort of pilgrimage. I was going to see John Graves, the writer and gentleman farmer, now 73 years old, at his...
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The Craftsman
John Graves is not a just a writer—he’s a character—an 89-year-old Emerson-quoting, city-hating kind of man. When senior editor Gary Cartwright recently visited Graves’s ranch, outside Glen Rose, the...
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Writing Life
Pissing off the porch seemed like the perfect metaphor for his chosen profession until one night last January, when John Graves was heading outside to relieve himself and fell down the stairs. His...
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Goodbye to a Writer
There was a time when John Graves, who died Tuesday at 92, was not the serene and towering elder statesman of the Texas literary world. But to people of my generation who knew him it was hard to...
View ArticleJohn Graves: An Appreciation
We first published John Graves in Texas Monthly in 1974. It was a selection from Hardscrabble, his book about his life on the place he and his wife Jane and his daughters Sally and Helen carved out of,...
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Author John Graves Was a Literary Godfather to Texas Monthly
Editors’ note: As we approach our fiftieth anniversary, in February 2023, we will, every week, highlight an important story from our past and offer some perspective on it. The writer John Graves was of...
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