J. Frank Dobie: A Liberated Mind (review)

Steven L. Davis, assistant curator of the southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University-San Marcos, has launched a rescue mission. His intent, in J. Frank Dobie: A Liberated Mind, is to save the memory of J. Frank Dobie from the ravages of his many recent detractors, Larry McMurtry among them. Human critics are bad enough, but a non-human detractor has done the most damage to Dobie's reputation: time.

Decades ago, when I began teaching classes in southwestern literature, a majority of students knew who Dobie was, and a few had even read some of his works. These days, it is next to impossible to find a student who has even heard the name. How could Dobie, once the undisputed arbiter of literary taste in Texas and the Southwest, have fallen into such obscurity?

I think McMurtry is correct in arguing that Dobie's writings are not substantial enough to support more than a minor literary reputation, though some of those writings retain a measure of charm: Coronado's Children (1930), for example, a collection of tales of lost mines and buried treasure in the Southwest, or his books on the lore of Southwestern animals—The Longhorns (1941), The Voice of the Coyote (1949), The Mustangs (1952), and others.

Dobie's books always sold well, and they inspired a generation of younger Texas writers. But later in life, Dobie's celebrity was largely the result of his outsized personality—and his ubiquity. He wrote a weekly column that ran in most major Texas newspapers. He had a radio show. He was frequently in the news for one reason or another. He could be opinionated, cranky, and just plain wrong, but he was also in many cases on the side of the angels. At a time when Dobie the man no longer walks among us, it is no doubt impossible to maintain what can only be called a cult of personality.

Davis's strategy is to trace Dobie's intellectual development. He was born in 1888 on an isolated ranch in the "brush country" of South Texas. As a young man he was, not surprisingly, a provincial, chauvinistic Texan. He graduated from a small college in central Texas and moved on to New York, where he earned a master's degree in English literature from Columbia University. He never took to New York, but he came to love Europe during army service in World War I. The story of Dobie's discovery in the 1920s of his roots in the folklore of his region, and his use of that lore as the basis for lucrative writing and a sometimes controversial teaching career, has been told often before, but Davis tells it well—and adds some nuggets of new information along the way.

The evolution in Dobie's thinking was gradual. In the 1930s, he was highly critical of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Politicized firings at the University of Texas and a year teaching American history at Cambridge University in England during World War II seem to have altered his political stance. In the 1940s, for instance, he called for the complete integration of the University of Texas. He defended the rights of labor unions. He opposed McCarthyism, which he saw as a form of homegrown fascism. By his death in 1964, Dobie's intellectual journey had indeed been a long and winding one.

Dobie's primary significance for those of us who teach courses in southwestern or western literature lies in the fact that he more or less invented such courses. His was the first. A famous (and perhaps apocryphal) anecdote recalls that when Dobie proposed developing a class in the literature of the Southwest at the University of Texas, his department head scoffed at the idea. The Southwest, he said, had no literature. "Well, it has plenty of life," Dobie countered. "I'll teach that" (76). Thus the title of his course, first offered in 1930: "Life and Literature of the Southwest."

Steven...