In Defense of Dobie

Reading between the lines about the father of Texas literature

By Steven L. Davis

Illustration: Tom Newsom OCTOBER 2019 13

On a soft autumn evening last year, I stood in a South Texas ghost town,
ready to climb up onto the bed of a rusted old pickup truck and speak
to nearly 300 people. The bed had been fashioned into a wooden stage,
decked with stringed lights and a small reading lamp. Nearby, a camp-
fire’s flames licked the cooling air. I looked out at the audience, friendly
folks who’d brought their own lawn chairs for this occasion. A breeze
rustled through the leaves and a fading orange glow hugged the south-
western horizon. What a perfect night for me to share old-time tales
collected by J. Frank Dobie, the father of Texas literature.
Dobie had been dead more than 50 years, but I’d just put together a
new book of his best writing, The Essential J. Frank Dobie (October 2019,
Texas A&M University Press). Now I was invited to join some of the state’s
leading writers and storytellers at this festive literary gathering known

as “Dobie Dichos,” Spanish for “sayings of Dobie.” Over

the past decade, I’ve become a regular here, joining

people from all over the state who travel to the historic

village of Oakville (pop. 30). Everyone gathers under a

majestic live oak tree beside an old stone jail and eats

chili con carne with pan de campo. Then, as the sun sets,

we pay homage to Dobie, who grew up on a nearby ranch

in the surrounding brush country, by reading his works.

Born in 1888, Dobie came of age just as old pastoral

lifeways were crumbling before the rapidly expanding

industrial age. In the 1920s, after serving in World War

I, he became an English instructor at the University of

Texas in Austin. Dobie taught British literature, for Amer-

ican writing was dismissed as unworthy of study.

As for Texas, well, we were known for cattle, not

books. Still, Dobie understood that our state had a proud

oral-storytelling tradition. He had grown up hearing

real-life accounts of the frontier days, of epic quests for

lost mines and buried treasures. He learned of renegade

Longhorns that busted out of northern stockyards and

traveled 800 miles to return home. Dobie knew vaqueros

who’d encountered ghosts every bit as real as Hamlet’s

father, and he heard accounts of trickster coyotes that

rivaled anything the Brothers Grimm had compiled.

Dobie feared that, while he was busy teaching young

Texans about British literary fashions, much of their

own cultural inheritance, which had never been written

down, was in danger of disappearing forever. He decided

to go out and collect these stories from surviving old-

timers. He adapted the tales he heard into best-selling

books and thus, Texas literature was born.

O

OPEN ROAD | ESSAY