The Essential J. Frank Dobie (Wittliff Collections Literary Series)

Praise for The Essential J. Frank Dobie (Wittliff Collections Literary Series)

“I recently referred in print to J. Frank Dobie as an ‘old-timey’ writer. I wish I had read this revelatory collection before tossing off that description. Under Steven L. Davis’s careful curation, Dobie emerges here as an unquestionably modern figure.  His luminous and biting  prose—as nature writer, travel writer, historian and public intellectual—feels unconfined by time and place, and as a passionate witness to the devastation of war and the destruction of the natural world he speaks to us now with a new urgency. The Essential J. Frank Dobie really is an essential book.”—Stephen Harrigan
— Stephen Harrigan

“What a wonder! The Essential J. Frank Dobie, carefully and graciously edited by Steven L. Davis, is the book we have long been awaiting. Dobie's unquenchable enthusiasm, passion for our state, and eloquent reveries on the poignant losses of time and change, feel crucial right now.
 
How could anyone ever have criticized Dobie? I think they were jealous. Few people have carried an appetite for collection as great as Dobie's. Here, Dobie and Davis, with helpful contextual commentary, offer everything from cedar fever anguish to an astonishing image of fireball lightning erupting on the horn-tips of an entire herd of longhorns during a mighty storm –
 
Once I had occasion to spend a solitary night in Dobie's Austin house, sleeping on a couch, and read the entire scrapbook of Dobie's early life off a bookshelf. A news clipping said Dobie visited a Dallas Tea Society and afterwards shook the hand of every single guest. This rich anthology does the same.”— Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People's Poet Laureate, Poetry Foundation
— Naomi Shihab Nye

“Despite J. Frank's Dobie's popularity as a legendary figure, his reputation as a writer has been compromised by a questioning of his literary status.  He is often relegated to restrictive labels—‘regional writer,’ folklorist. Editor Steve Davis's selection ranges from Dobie's then-controversial, still-relevant essays on politics, human rights, academia, to his fiction, rich with sharply drawn, memorable characters and poignant memories. This fine collection asserts that J. Frank Dobie is an authentic author in the realm of American literature.” —John Rechy, author of City of Night and The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez — and the first novelist to win the PEN USA award for Lifetime Achievement
 
— John Rechy

“My mom remembered Dobie on the family’s porch in Cotulla, sitting with my grandfather and his compadres, listening to their stories and recording them with a pencil in a little notebook. As a kid, I sought him out as ‘that writer’ connected to our Lopez family, whose work revealed Texas to me as a great human epic, from its indigenous origins, through its Mexican settlement, and later, the arrival of people from all over the world. His voice was full of compassion and curiosity.  His Texas was a place of astounding transformations, of ‘vanished races, vanished centuries, and vanished ways of human life.’  In this elegantly assembled anthology, Steven L. Davis reminds us of Dobie’s legacy as a literary natural historian and poetic ethnographer from the Brush Country, of his vision of a ‘greater Tejas’ that spanned at least from the Sierra Madre to the Panhandle, of a free thinker who could connect the hardscrabble life of old Texas with the destiny of humanity itself. This necessary volume makes clear: No writer concerned with the question of Texas should ignore Dobie.”—John Phillip Santos
— John Phillip Santos