IN THE UNIVERSITY of Texas I teach a course called "Life and Literature of the Southwest." About 1929 I had a brief guide to books concerning the Southwest mimeographed; in 1931 it was included by John William Rogers in a booklet entitled Finding Literature on the Texas Plains. After that I revised and extended the guide three or four times, during the process distributing several thousand copies of the mimeographed forms. Now the guide has grown too long, and I trust that this printing of it will prevent my making further additions—though within a short time new books will come out that should be added. Yet the guide is fragmentary, incomplete, and in no sense a bibliography. Its emphases vary according to my own indifferences and ignorance as well as according to my own sympathies and knowledge. It is strong on the character and ways of life of the early settlers, on the growth of the soil, and on everything pertaining to the range; it is weak on information concerning politicians and on citations to studies which, in the manner of orthodox Ph.D. theses, merely transfer bones from one graveyard to another. It is designed primarily to help people of the Southwest see significances in the features of the land to which they belong, to make their environments more interesting to them, their past more alive, to bring them to a realization of the values of their own cultural inheritance, and to stimulate them to observe. It includes most of the books about the Southwest that people in general would agree on as making good reading. I have never had any idea of writing or teaching about my own section of the country merely as a patriotic duty. Without apologies, I would interpret it because I love it, because it interests me, talks to me, appeals to my imagination, warms my emotions; also because it seems to me that other people living in the Southwest will lead fuller and richer lives if they become aware of what it holds. I once thought that, so far as reading goes, I could live forever on the supernal beauty of Shelley's "The Cloud" and his soaring lines "To a Skylark," on the rich melancholy of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," on Cyrano de Bergerac's ideal of a free man, on Wordsworth's philosophy of nature—a philosophy that has illuminated for me the mesquite flats and oak-studded hills of Texas—on the adventures in Robert Louis Stevenson, the flavor and wit of Lamb's essays, the eloquent wisdom of Hazlitt, the dark mysteries of Conrad, the gaieties of Barrie, the melody of Sir Thomas Browne, the urbanity of Addison, the dash in Kipling, the mobility, the mightiness, the lightness, the humor, the humanity, the everything of Shakespeare, and a world of other delicious, high, beautiful, and inspiring things that English literature has bestowed upon us. That literature is still the richest of heritages; but literature is not enough.
The Hunting of the Buffalo, originally published in 1929, tells all about the marvelous and useful animal that once roamed the American plains. Its gradual extermination is chronicled by E. Douglas Branch, who drew on rich materials, including Indian legends, old letters and diaries, and tales of frontier travelers. No one has ever written more memorably about the great herds, their habits and haunts, their importance to the Indians, their discovery by awed whites, their decimation by huge cultural and economic forces.
J. Frank Dobie, master storyteller of the American Southwest, here tells the tale of the wild and free mustangs that once roamed the western ranges. This is the story, too, of the white men and the Indians, no less wild and free, who captured them, gentled them, rode them, and annihilated them. An American classic, The Mustangs is a thoughtful and carefully crafted book by one of this country's literary greats. "This is a magnificent book, so packed with lore and legend that one is not conscious of the fact that it is history, too. Frank Dobie tells the story of the mustangs . . . the story too of the men, and the way of life the mustang brought into being." --New York Herald Tribune "Mr. Dobie brings together all his findings in a single book of solid scholarship, documented to the hilt, and inspired by his unflagging enthusiasm for the wild free creatures of the West. The Mustangs will probably remain the standard work on the subject." --New York Times "Not alone from stodgy tomes and rare pamphlets of cloistered libraries of a continent, but from widely scattered remudas and firsthand experiences of salty wranglers, have come the color, flavor and vitality to this beautiful book." --Dallas Times Herald
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