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Books
LITERARY DALLAS
Francis Brannen
Vick, editor
(Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2008)
Hardcover
Pages 384
ISBN: 978-0875653820
$29.95
Review by Dr.
Kirk Bane,
Central Texas Historical Association
November 1, 2023 |
Lon
Tinkle wrote for the DALLAS MORNING NEWS, taught literature at Southern
Methodist University, served as president of the Texas Institute of
Letters, and is best known for authoring the prize-winning history,
THIRTEEN DAYS TO GLORY: THE SIEGE OF THE ALAMO (1958). In THE KEY
TO DALLAS, published in 1965, he observed: "Dallas
is a city on the go. The people of Dallas
like to do things; they prefer action to sitting around and talking
and thinking about it. The city strikes the eye with all the brightness
and freshness of a newly minted silver dollar. Most cities look weathered,
like sturdy trees, or like ships at anchor after a long voyage. Dallas,
with its aluminum-skin buildings and its gleaming white structures,
reminds you more of a jet plane ready to take off…Some of the people
are rich, very rich—like certain oil millionaires. They live
in mansions on big estates. They have their own private airplanes
and pilots ready to whisk them at a moment's notice to and from their
large Texas ranches, their private islands in the Gulf of Mexico…their
other homes scattered in distant places around the globe…Some are
poor, very poor-like hundreds of Dallas families, white and black,
who live in flimsy wooden shacks on dusty streets (or muddy in the
rainy season), without city water or sewers to serve them."
Professor Tinkle's assessment of Dallas
is just one of more than seventy-five entries in Frances Brannen Vick's
superb anthology, LITERARY DALLAS. In addition to Tinkle, other authors,
many of whom will be familiar to Texas readers, include A. C. Greene,
Wayne Gard, Frank X. Tolbert, Ruthe Winegarten, John Neal Phillips,
Kent Biffle, Lee Cullum, Lawrence Wright, Darwin Payne, Bryan Woolley,
Bud Shrake, Paul Crume, Grover Lewis, Evelyn Oppenheimer, Jay Dunston
Milner, Tracy Daugherty, Skip Hollandsworth, and Prudence Mackintosh.
Dr. Vick, director of the University of North Texas Press and former
president of the Texas State Historical Association, divides her collection
into three segments: "Part One: From the Beginnings to 1963," "Part
Two: The Kennedy Assassination and Its Aftermath," and "Part Three:
The Rebuilding and Growing-1964 to 2008."
Some of the most captivating selections revolve around President Kennedy's
murder. Lawrence Wright, for instance, insightfully evaluates the
disposition of Dallas in
the period prior to November 1963. "The superheated political climate
in the city," he asserts, "brought ordinary life to a rolling boil…The
brakes were off in Dallas." And novelist Bud Shrake vividly describes
JFK's tragic death in Dealey Plaza. "The first two shots," Shrake
writes, "echoed through the plaza, bounced off the county jail and
the Depository, caroming around the plaza, and people were running,
falling, dodging, throwing themselves onto the ground as in war movies.
On the grassy knoll I saw figures scattering, and Kennedy continued
to lean in the creeping Lincoln…POP…Pieces of skull sailed out of
Kennedy's head. A red spray flew out, as if a stone had been thrown
into a pot of tomato soup…At last the car moved. As the president's
wife began scrambling out of the back of the car, out of this blood
and madness, at last the car moved forward, carrying its passengers
too late down into the underpass."
LITERARY DALLAS belongs to the excellent "Literary Cities" Series
published by TCU Press. Other editions in this collection examine
Fort Worth, El
Paso, San Antonio,
and Houston. Texas history
enthusiasts should own these impressive volumes. |
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