The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989 Page: 5
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J. Frank Dobie
cowboy life, and . . . the best book that ever can be written of cowboy
life."'6 But in the post-World War II era fiction was the new arena of
excellence, and Dobie, temperamentally at least, wasn't well equipped
to be its best arbiter. Nobody in Texas of his generation was.
Not surprisingly, considering his years of devotion to cowboy lore,
Dobie seems to have been particularly suspicious of western fiction that
purported to tell the truth about range life. Alan Le May's The Un-
forgiven (1957), for example, received a brief negative assessment: "Not
nearly so good as it's touted up to be. In a little while it will be forgotten,
along with looo's of other cow country fictions." His opinion of a more
famous range novel, Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident,
recorded in a paperback edition in 1954, expresses a similar view: "The
novel is worthy of respect, but its celebration shows how hard up the
West is for fiction." Dobie's hatred of formula Westerns, the Zane Grey
school, seems to have contributed to his disposition to judge very se-
verely indeed any attempts to write western fiction within the formulaic
tradition, however serious or imaginative the writer might be.
Dobie also brought to his judgment of fiction a strong moralistic
strain. Sometimes this tendency led to cursory and unfair judgments of
the authors themselves. Texas author William Humphrey, for example,
fared very poorly at the hands of Dobie. Here is Dobie on Humphrey's
first novel, Home from the Hill (1958): "Much touted. Knopf's own word
for the novel would go far with me. Still, Humphrey does not strike me
as a whole man; I do not find time to read him." What on earth could
Dobie have meant by calling Humphrey not a "whole man"?
Another review ad hominem was directed at the author of The Round-
ers (1960), of whom Dobie noted: "This Max Evans did fairly well on
John Dunn of Taos, though he had there no perspective. He has writ-
ten me 2 or 3 times, the last time wanting to do my biography. He is a
Philistine & a pretender to what he is not. Look at his mug on back of
jacket." The letters Dobie refers to were breezy, first-name notes from
Evans, and they obviously offended Dobie's sense of manners. But then
so did Evans's photograph on the jacket.
Dobie's dismissal of Evans contains one kernel of valid principle-
the notion of perspective, by which he seems to have meant some-
thing like mature, balanced judgment. In any case, his high regard for
Michael W. Straight's Carrington (1960) combines this standard with
others that reflect what Dobie wanted in fiction: "Whether this novel
wins popularity or not, it was written by a civilized gentleman with per-
6J. Frank Dobie, "Andy Adams, Cowboy Chronicler," min Prefaces (Boston- Little, Brown &
Co., 1975), 4. This essay originally appeared min Southwest Review, XI (Jan., 1926), 92- 101.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989, periodical, 1989; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101212/m1/32/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.