The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 78, July 1974 - April, 1975 Page: 106
562 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
brothers and sisters nor children. Gradually a life once so full of fun and
froth hardened into a sad existence of solitude and pain. Josephine Clardy
Fox died in I970, immensely wealthy, the generous patron of art and edu-
cation-prominent, but virtually unknown.
Ruby Burns, former social editor of the El Paso Times, has written a
sympathetic yet human biography, one that may well have special meaning
for this age of women's liberation. Josephine Clardy Fox was a product of
her times, lived by the values handed her as a girl, developed little of her
own besides the estate that came from the El Paso subdivisions and shop-
ping center named for her, yet lived long enough to have the limitations of
her upbringing become cruelly evident.
Southern Methodist University RONALD L. DAVIS
My Blood's Country: Studies in Southwestern Literature. By William T.
Pilkington. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1973. PP-
viii+211. Index. $3-50.)
My Blood's Country is a collection of essays on southwestern literature
which Pilkington wrote between 1965 and the present. Most of the book's
eleven essays have appeared in print elsewhere, usually in learned journals,
but at least two-the first and the last-were written especially for this pub-
lication. Pilkington's main focus is upon individual southwestern writers,
with full chapters devoted to Harvey Fergusson, Edwin Corle, Paul Horgan,
Edward Abbey, Frank Waters, and William A. Owens. One chapter is
devoted to Cabeza de Vaca's narrative, one to the comic novel in the South-
west, and one to the essays of Larry McMurtry and Larry King. These,
along with the prefatory and concluding chapters on the region and its
writings, give the reader a good, if somewhat atomistic and incomplete, pic-
ture of the literature of the Southwest.
The chief value of Pilkington's book is that it draws together in one
place some very penetrating studies of a few neglected writers and that it
offers some general comment on the literature of the region. The chief
weakness is that the book follows no basic overall plan. Pilkington tells us
in the preface that he had originally intended to "splice" the essays "into
a continuous whole," but he begs off that task by saying that the subjects
are "diverse and unruly" and that his attitudes toward some of them have
changed over the years. I have read such demurrers before, and I was not
convinced. I still am not. It is a shame that Pilkington did not perform his
"splicing," for he is more capable of writing the definitive study of modern
southwestern literature than anyone who has published widely in the area.zo6
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 78, July 1974 - April, 1975, periodical, 1974/1975; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth117149/m1/124/?rotate=90: accessed March 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.