Winifred Sanford: The Life and Times of a Texas Writer by Betty Holland Wiesepape (review)

When I was writing my book Gushers (2009) about the history of oilfield novels of Texas, I had not planned to include any short stories, but I considered Winifred Sanford’s “Fever in the South” so good and so important that I could not exclude it. It was the first work of fiction about the East Texas oilfield and the extraordinary boom there. It was published in November 1931 in The American Mercury, only one year after the famous Daisy Bradford #3 was brought in by Dad Joiner. Sanford’s husband was an oil lawyer working out of Longview, and Sanford had an opportunity to see the boom first hand. I was curious about Sanford because of the high quality of this story and those about the Burkburnett field, “Luck” and “Windfall,” and because of the absence of any later work by such a talented writer. I had read the introduction and afterword to the Southern Methodist University Press collection of her work, Windfall and Other Stories (1988), and these provided important information about her work and life, but I remained curious.

Now Betty Holland Wiesepape has answered my questions in her biography, Winifred Sanford: The Life and Times of a Texas Writer. In 1989, after reading Windfall and Other Stories, Wiesepape set out to answer the questions about why Sanford ceased writing and publishing. She began by meeting with Sanford’s daughter, Helen Jackson Sanford, and receiving from her many letters and unpublished works. She gained access to other important letters and manuscripts, many of them provided by Steve Davis at the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University, where Sanford’s papers are now archived. She mined this material carefully and skillfully. I was particularly pleased with the use of Sanford’s husband’s letters before and after World War I. The author provides excellent background to Sanford’s life, for example, by describing in detail Duluth, Minnesota, where Sanford grew up, the Bronx of 1916, where Sanford lived while working as a librarian, and Wichita Falls, where she joined like-minded women in a literary club. Wiesepape emphasizes the importance of the literary club in Wichita Falls to Sanford’s productivity and success. Sanford was a charter member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and this book provides important information about the early years of that institution. In this section, the author covers Sanford’s friendship with Karle Wilson Baker, another important author of the East Texas oilfield. Wiesepape also emphasizes H. L. Mencken’s importance to Sanford’s career by commenting on it extensively and by including many quotations from their correspondence. An appendix provides many complete letters from Mencken. Another appendix contains two previously unpublished stories by Sanford, “Star in the East” and “Deep C.” A third provides two brief previously published explanations about writing, one on irony in her story “The Wreck” and one about how to write a short story.

Though Sanford wrote at least two novels and probably a third, none were published and were probably destroyed by Sanford. She did more writing; she did not just write a few short stories and then retire. Wiesepape provides several good explanations for Sanford’s discontinuance of her writing career.

I learned what I wanted from the biography. And I learned lots more. One interesting bit is that from Sanford’s story, “Luck,” her grandson, Philip Railsback, wrote a film script which was filmed as The Stars Fell on Henrietta, produced by Clint Eastwood and starring Robert Duvall. Now I’m curious about that.