Front Cover: Walter Prescott Webb and Terrell Maverick Webb, December 1961. Courtesy Walter Prescott Webb Papers, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the University of Texas at Austin, di#02593.
The July issue of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly not only starts Vol. 113, but it introduces a four-part series of letters between Walter Prescott Webb and Terrell Maverick (Webb), Touched with a Sunset" The two principals likely need little introduction: Walter Prescott Webb was a longtime history professor at the University of Texas at Austin; author of The Great Plains (1931), one of the most influential histories ever written of the American West; Director of the Texas State Historical Association (1939—1946); and editor of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. Terrell Maverick was the wife of Maury Maverick, the well-known politician from San Antonio, until he died in 1954. Walter and Terrell fell in love in 1961; Walter was seventy-three and Terrell sixty. These letters reveal their lovely—though dosed liberally with a good amount of wry, self-aware humor by both parties—golden-age courtship and romance. Walter wrote that his later life had been "touched with a sunset of ineffable beauty" because of his romance with Terrell.