The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 92, July 1988 - April, 1989 Page: 13
682 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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J. Frank Dobie
Children, Dobie's first big success, as his best and most characteristic work.
Most importantly, Pilkington actually examines the structure of Coro-
nado's Children. He defends the "rather chaotic" organization as a delib-
erate attempt by Dobie to imitate the random casualness of stories told
in the oral tradition. Thus Pilkington's Dobie is a successful "mosaicist"
who consciously structures his books and employs irony and symbolism
to control a stylistic tendency toward romantic excess.'8 For Pilkington,
Dobie is neither folklorist nor historian but rather a literary artist.
On the other hand, one recent critique of Dobie is harsher than
anything McMurtry offered. In his essay "Arbiters of Texas Literary
Taste," James W. Lee states that Dobie possessed "genius" in only one
regard: "as a promoter." Like Andrew Jolly, Lee finds elements of the
poseur in Dobie's colorful persona, seeing him as a kind of Big Tex of
Texas literature. He argues that "Dobie's career was the result of his
cleverness as a self-promoter, his untiring ambition, some facility as a
journalist, and the fact that Texas can always use an 'interpreter' to the
nation." Calling Dobie the "Great Cham of Texas literature," Lee con-
tinues, "He became a literary dictator without taste and without serious
study. He knew nothing about literature, but he knew what he liked.
He liked books about cowboys, Indians, Texas Rangers, mustangs,
humble Mexicans, ranch life, and buried treasure." Of the writing it-
self, Lee pronounces Dobie's style "stilted and awkward."'
A completely different estimation appears in A Literary History of the
American West, a massive work of academic scholarship and hagiog-
raphy. Henry L. Alsmeyer, Jr., author of a dissertation on Dobie's view
of nature, declares Dobie a "realmist rather than a regionalist." But
like the other hagiographers, of whom Dobie has certainly had his
share, Alsmeyer is content to make sweeping statements rather than
demonstrate the grounds of Dobie's artistic accomplishment. He, too,
believes that The Mustangs may "prove to be the most enduring of
Dobie's works."20 It is hard to accept such a judgment, though. The Mus-
tangs has nothing to distinguish it from the other books on animals: it is
meandering, sentimental, topically organized, and anecdotal.
Dobie's least rigorous critics prefer The Mustangs; others prefer, it
seems, either Tongues of the Monte or Coronado's Children. My own pref-
"t'Pilkington, "Doble Revisited," 26.
" James W. Lee, "Arbiters of Texas Literary Taste" (in a collection of essays on Texas writing
forthcoming from Southern Methodist Umniversity Press), 3 (4th and 5th quotations), 4 (3rd and
6th quotations), 5 (xst and 2nd quotations).
2Henry L. Alsmeyer, Jr, "J. Frank Dobie," in A Laterary History of the American West, ed.
J. Golden Taylor et al (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987), 535 (1st quota-
tion), 541 (2nd quotation).
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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/m1/40/: accessed April 27, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.