Literary Dallas, edited by Francis Brannen Vick. (original) (raw)

Books
Francis Brannen Vick, editor (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 2008)
Hardcover
Pages 384
ISBN: 978-0875653820
$29.95Review 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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