San Antonio is often described as the “mother” of Texas cities—the oldest and, for two and a half centuries, the largest city in Texas. To many it is, as novelist Larry McMurtry once famously proclaimed, “the one truly lovely city in the state.” Long recognized as a cultural crossroads between two continents, writers in San Antonio, both native and visiting, have had a significant effect upon the city’s literary and cultural landscape. Novels were being written in the city by the late 1830s. Nineteenth century writers like Frederick Law Olmsted, Sydney Lanier, and O. Henry wrote effusively about San Antonio; Oscar Wilde found here “a thrill of strange pleasure.” Here the Mexican Revolution was called into being, and here were the political and literary origins of the Chicano Movement. Literary San Antonio provides dozens of examples of the interplay and cross-pollination of Anglo and Latino literary forms, ideas, and traditions that led to the creation of a unique borderlands or frontera literature. This city, with its winding, still-sleepy river and its story-shrouded springs; its ancient acequias and missions, now acknowledged as valued “world heritage” sites; its sacred battle grounds and historic military forts and bases; its several unique neighborhoods and barrios that have produced and been celebrated by generations of writers; its rich heritage of heroism and revolutionary passion; its endlessly celebratory ability to revel in its multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual roots and branches . . . this city is a good place to write, to write about, and to wander with a book in hand.

A record of literary properties sold at auction in the United States.

“This is the best work ever written on hidden treasure, and one of the most fascinating books on any subject to come out of Texas.” —Basic Texas Books Written in 1930, Coronado’s Children was one of J. Frank Dobie’s first books, and the one that helped gain him national prominence as a folklorist. In it, he recounts the tales and legends of those hardy souls who searched for buried treasure in the Southwest following in the footsteps of that earlier gold seeker, the Spaniard Coronado. “These people,” Dobie writes in his introduction, “no matter what language they speak, are truly Coronado’s inheritors . . . I have called them Coronado’s children. They follow Spanish trails, buffalo trails, cow trails, they dig where there are no trails; but oftener than they dig or prospect they just sit and tell stories of lost mines, of buried bullion by the jack load . . .” This is the tale-spinning Dobie at his best, dealing with subjects as irresistible as ghost stories and haunted houses. “As entrancing a volume as one is likely to pick up in a month of Sundays.” —The New York Times “Dobie has discovered for us a native Arabian Night.” —Chicago Evening Post