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.

In Giant Country Don Graham brings together a collection of lively, absorbing essays written over the past two decades. The collection begins with a twist on book introductions that sets the tone for the essays to come—a self-interview conducted poolside at an eccentric Houston motel favored by regional rock bands. Over piña coladas the author works on his tan and discusses timeless Texas themes: the transition of the state from a rural to an urban world, the sense of a vanishing era, and the way that artists in literature and film represent a state both infectiously grand and too big for its britches. In “Fildelphia Story,” Graham remembers his Ivy League professorial stint in a city the small-town Texan who rented him a moving van looked up under “F.” In “Doing England” the Lone Star Yankee courts Oxford University and returns with a veddy British education. In “The Ground Sense Necessary” a native son journeys inward to explore the dry ceremonies of frontier Protestantism and to recount movingly his father's funeral in Collin County. With his wide-ranging knowledge of classic regional works, Graham unerringly traces the style and substance of local literary giants and offers a sometimes irreverent but always entertaining look at the Texas triumvirate of Dobie, Webb and Bedichek. Other essays look at such Texas greats as Katherine Anne Porter, George Sessions Perry, William Humphrey and John Graves. In a section he calls “Polemics,” Graham includes his best known essays, “Palefaces vs. Redskins,” a sardonic survey of the Texas literary landscape, and “Anything for Larry,” a tour de force that has already become a minor classic. The essay weighs the puny financial achievements of Graham against those of mega-author Larry McMurtry and never fails to bring down the house when Graham gives a public reading. A recognized authority on celluloid Texas, Graham provides a rich sampling of his knowledge of Texas movies in pieces that blanket the territory from moo-cow cattle-drive epics to soggy Alamo sagas to urban cowboy melodramas. In the larger-than-life state that is Texas, nobody sizes up the Lone-Star mythos, its interpreters, boosters and detractors better than Don Graham.

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

Mexican settlers first came to the valley of the Rio Grande to establish their ranchos in the 1750s. Two centuries later the Great River, dammed in an international effort by the U.S. and Mexican governments to provide flood control and a more dependable water supply, inundated twelve settlements that had been built there. Under the waters of the new Falcón Reservoir lay homes, businesses, churches, and cemeteries abandoned by residents on both sides of the river when the floods of 1953 filled the 115,000-acre area two years ahead of schedule. The Smithsonian Institution, the National Park Service, and the University of Texas at Austin conducted an initial survey of the communities lost to the Falcón Reservoir, but these studies were never completed or fully reported. When architect W. Eugene George came to the area in the 1960s, he found a way of life waiting to be preserved in words, photographs, and drawings. Two subsequent recessions of the reservoir—in 1983–86 and again in 1996–98—gave George new access to one of the settlements, Guerrero Viejo in Mexico. Unfortunately, the receding lake waters also made the village accessible to looters. George’s work, then, was crucial in documenting the indigenous architecture of these villages, both as it existed prior to the flooding and as it remained before it was despoiled by vandals’ hands. Lost Architecture of the Rio Grande Borderlands combines George’s original 1975 Texas Historical Commission report with the information he gleaned during the two low-water periods. This handsome, extended photographic essay casts new light on the architecture and lives of the people of the Texas-Mexico borderlands.