Sundown, by John Joseph Mathews (1934), goes more profoundly than Laughing Boy into the soul of a young Indian (an Osage) and his people. Its translation of the "long, long thoughts" of the boy and then of "shades of the prison house" closing down upon him is superb writing. The "shades of the prison house" come from oil, with all of the world's coarse thumbs that go with oil.
GEORGE SESSIONS PERRY'S Hold Autumn in Your Hand (1941) incarnates a Texas farm hand too poor "to flag a gut-wagon," but with the good nature, dignity, and independence of the earth itself. Walls Rise Up (1939) is a kind of Crock of Gold, both whimsical and earthy, laid on the Brazos River.
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER is as dedicated to artistic perfection as was A. E. Housman. Her output has, therefore, been limited: Flowering Judas (1930, enlarged 1935); Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), The Leaning Tower (1944). Her stories penetrate psychology, especially the psychology of a Mexican hacienda, with rare finesse. Her small canvases sublimate the inner realities of men and women. She appeals only to cultivated taste, and to some tastes no other fiction writer in America today is her peer in subtlety.
EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES died in 1934. Most of his novels—distinguished by intricate plots and bright dialogue—had appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. His finest story is "Paso Por Aqui," published in the volume entitled Once in the Saddle (1927). Gene Rhodes, who has a canyon—on which he ranched—named for him in New Mexico, was an artist; at the same time, he was a man akin to his land and its men. He is the only writer of the range country who has been accorded a biography—The Hired Man on Horseback, by May D. Rhodes, his wife. See under "Range Life."
CONRAD RICHTER'S The Sea of Grass (1937) is a kind of prose poem, beautiful and tragic. Lutie, wife of the owner of the grass, is perhaps the most successful creation of a ranch woman that fiction has so far achieved.
DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH'S The Wind (1925) excited the wrath of chambers of commerce and other boosters in West Texas—a tribute to its realism.
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (1939), made Okies a word in the American language. Although dated by the Great Depression, its humanity and realism are beyond date. It is among the few good novels produced by America in the first half of the twentieth century.
JOHN W. THOMASON, after fighting as a marine in World War I, wrote Fix Bayonets (1926), followed by Jeb Stuart (1930). A native Texan, he followed the southern tradition rather than the western. Lone Star Preacher (1941) is a strong and sympathetic characterization of Confederate fighting men woven into fictional form.
In High John the Conqueror (Macmillan, 1948) John W. Wilson conveys real feeling for the tragic life of Negro sharecroppers in the Brazos bottoms. He represents the critical awareness of life that has come to modern fiction of the Southwest, in contrast to the sterile action, without creation of character, in most older fiction of the region.