Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, with a Few Observations

by J. Frank Dobie

HOGUE, WAYMAN. Back Yonder. Minton, Balch, New York, 1932. Ozark life. OP.

HOOPER, J. J. Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, 1845. OP. Downright realism. Like Longstreet, Hooper in maturity wanted his realism forgotten. An Alabama journalist, he got into the camp of respectable slave-holders and spent the later years of his life shouting against the "enemies of the institution of African slavery." His life partly explains the lack of intellectual honesty in most southern spokesmen today. Alias Simon Suggs: The Life and Times of Johnson Jones Hooper, by W. Stanley Hoole, University of Alabama Press, 1952, is a careful study of Hooper's career.

HUDSON, A. P. Humor of the Old Deep South, New York, 1936. An anthology. OP.

LONGSTREET, A. B. Georgia Scenes, 1835. Numerous reprints. Realism.

MASTERSON, JAMES R. Tall Tales of Arkansas, Boston, 1943. OP. The title belies this excellent social history—by a scholar. It has become quite scarce on account of the fact that it contains unexpurgated versions of the notorious speech on "Change the Name of Arkansas"—which in 1919 in officers' barracks at Bordeaux, France, I heard a lusty individual recite with as many variations as Roxane of Cyrano de Bergerac wanted in love-making. When Fred W. Allsopp, newspaper publisher and pillar of Arkansas respectability, found that this book of unexpurgations had been dedicated to him by the author—a Harvard Ph.D. teaching in Michigan—he almost "had a colt."

MEINE, FRANKLIN J. (editor). Tall Tales of the Southwest, Knopf, New York, 1930. A superbly edited and superbly selected anthology with appendices affording a guide to the whole field of early southern humor and realism. No cavalier idealism. The "Southwest" of this excellent book is South.

OLMSTED, FREDERICK LAW. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 1856. A Journey Through Texas, 1857. Invaluable books on social history.

POSTL, KARL ANTON (Charles Sealsfield or Francis Hardman, pseudonyms). The Cabin Book; Frontier Life. Translations all OP.

RANDOLPH, VANCE. We Always Lie to Strangers, Columbia University Press, New York, 1951. A collection of tall tales of the adding machine variety. Fertile in invention but devoid of any yearning for the beautiful or suggestion that the human spirit hungers for something beyond horse play; in short, typical of American humor.

ROURKE, CONSTANCE. American Humor, 1931; Davy Crockett, 1934; Roots of American Culture and Other Essays, 1942, all published by Harcourt, Brace, New York.