(The product of over thirty years of research, this book w...)
The product of over thirty years of research, this book will make you view the coyote on an entirely different plane. Dobie pens what he calls a "biography" of the coyote by tracing this mysterious and exciting animal throughout history and weaving together entertaining stories of fact, fiction, science and imagination. This collection of stories will not only make you laugh, but will introduce you to a fascinating but long-misunderstood animal. Cloth edition with color-foil stamping.
https://www.amazon.com/Voice-Coyote-J-Frank-Dobie/dp/0785813756?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0785813756
(Map endpages. Frontspiece illustration by Ben Carlton Mea...)
Map endpages. Frontspiece illustration by Ben Carlton Mead. Black Hardback with bright yellow lettering.
https://www.amazon.com/Coronados-Children-Buried-Treasures-Southwest/dp/B000EDOEAA?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000EDOEAA
(The Longhorn cattle were brought to The New World by the ...)
The Longhorn cattle were brought to The New World by the Spanish conquistadors and many feel that the Longhorns brought the Texas cowboy into being. This book is full of legend, folklore, and love for the Longhorn cattle breed.
https://www.amazon.com/Longhorns-J-Frank-Dobie-1941-06-23/dp/B01N5JDMNK?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B01N5JDMNK
Dobie was born on September 26, 1888 in a ranch house on Ramirenia Creek in Live Oak County, Texas. He was the son of Richard Jonathan Dobie, a cattleman, community leader, and county commissioner, and of Ella Byler, a former schoolteacher. His mother compiled "recommended reading" lists for her son and supplemented his meager education until he was sixteen.
When he was young, Dobie's father Richard read to him from the Bible while his mother Ella read to him from books such as Ivanhoe and Pilgrim's Progress. At 16, Dobie moved to Alice, the seat of Jim Wells County, Texas, where he lived with his grandparents and finished high school.
In 1906, he enrolled in Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, where he was introduced to English poetry by a professor who urged him to become a writer. He graduated in 1910. In 1913, he went to Columbia University in New York City to work on a master's degree.
After he graduated in 1910, Dobie worked briefly for newspapers in San Antonio and Galveston, before gaining his first teaching job at a high school in Alpine in southwestern Texas. In 1911, he returned to Georgetown to teach at the Southwestern Preparatory School. In 1914, he returned to Texas to join the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, becoming affiliated with the Texas Folklore Society as well. In 1917, he left the university to serve in the field artillery in World War I, and was briefly sent overseas at the end of the war; he was discharged in 1919.
Dobie began to publish his first articles in 1919; by 1920 he was writing articles mostly about Longhorn cattle and life in the southwest. He left the faculty at the University of Texas to work on his uncle's ranch in La Salle County, north of Laredo, where he developed a desire to write about Texas ranch life and southwestern folklore. After a year on the ranch, Dobie returned to the University of Texas and began to use its library and the resources of the Texas Folklore Society to write articles about the vanishing way of life on rural Texas ranches. In 1922, he became secretary of the Texas Folklore Society and began a program for publication, holding the post of secretary-editor of the society for twenty-one years.
In 1923, unable to get a promotion without a PhD, Dobie accepted a job at Oklahoma A&M College as the chair of its English department. While in Oklahoma, he wrote for the Country Gentleman. He returned to Austin in 1925 after receiving a token promotion with the help of his friends. Upon returning to Austin, Dobie published his first book, A Vaquero of the Brush Country in 1929, which helped establish him as an authentic voice of Texas and southwestern culture. While the title page said that the book was "Partly from the Reminiscences of John Young", the author was given as J. Frank Dobie. The book was the result of a collaboration between Dobie and John D. Young, a former open-range vaquero who had fought against the encroachment of barbed wire on the rangelands of southwest Texas. Young had written Dobie, requesting help in writing his autobiography, and saying that he intended to use the profits earned by the book to build a hotel for cattlemen in San Antonio. Dobie agreed to assist Young in this endeavor; using the narrative of reminiscences related by Young, he rearranged the raw material and rewrote it in the prose of historical writing.
Although Lawrence Clark Powell, an authority on western writing at the University of California, had written in the preface to the 1957 edition, "it was unmistakably Dobie on every page, in every paragraph, sentence, and word. .. ", Young's heirs filed a petition in 1994 with U. S. District Court For the Western District Of Texas, asserting that John Young was coauthor of the book with Dobie. The matter of the authorship of A Vaquero of the Brush Country was ultimately resolved in this litigation between Young's descendants and the estate of J. Frank Dobie and the University of Texas, holders of interests in the copyright. The court's decision established John Young and J. Frank Dobie as joint authors of A Vaquero of the Brush Country.
In 1930, Dobie published Coronado's Children, a collection of folklore about lost mines and lost treasures. This was followed by a series of books in the 1930's. In 1941 he published The Longhorns, a commercial success that was well received by book critics and got a full-page review in the New York Times. It is considered one of the best descriptions of the traditions of the Texas Longhorn cattle breed during the 19th century. In 1937, Dobie was visiting Thomas Calloway Lea, Jr. , a friend and prominent attorney in El Paso. After seeing the art work of Lea's son, Tom Lea, Dobie asked the younger man to illustrate the book he was then working on, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. Tom Lea later completed the illustrations for The Longhorns, as well as a biography of Texas pioneer John C. Duval. Dobie and Lea remained good friends for the rest of Dobie's life.
During World War II, Dobie taught American history at Cambridge University. He returned to Europe after the war to teach in England, Germany, and Austria, and later wrote of his experiences at Cambridge in his book A Texan in England. When University of Texas President Homer Rainey was fired by the Board of Regents in 1944 for his liberal views, Dobie was outraged and made his views known publicly, causing Texas Governor Coke Stevenson to say that Dobie should also be dismissed. Dobie's subsequent request for an extension of his leave of absence was rejected, and he was dismissed from UT in 1947.
After his dismissal from the University of Texas, Dobie published another series of books and anthologies of stories about the open range. On September 14, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, a long-time Texas political rival of Coke Stevenson, awarded him the Medal of Freedom. Dobie died four days later on September 18. His funeral was held in Hogg Auditorium on the University of Texas Campus and he is interred at the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.
Dobie was probably the most significant writer in Texas and the most ardent interpreter of southwestern culture between the late 1920's and mid-1960's. He belonged to a group of regionally based liberals, predominantly Texans, that included the folklorists John Avery Lomax and Stith Thompson, and the historian Walter Prescott Webb, at a time when grass-roots agrarianism, collectivism, and national consensus dominated American culture. Coronado's Children won the Literary Guild Award for 1931 and secured a Guggenheim grant (1932-1933) for Dobie. In 2009, Dobie was posthumously honored by Frontier Times Museum in Bandera as one of its first inductees into the Texas Heroes Hall of Honor.
(The Longhorn cattle were brought to The New World by the ...)
(The product of over thirty years of research, this book w...)
(Map endpages. Frontspiece illustration by Ben Carlton Mea...)
In 1939, Dobie began publishing a Sunday newspaper column in which he routinely poked fun at Texas politics. A liberal Democrat, he often found an easy target for his words in the antics of the state's politicians. Regarding state politics, he once wrote, "When I get ready to explain homemade fascism in America, I can take my example from the state capitol of Texas.
As a public figure, he was known in his lifetime for his outspoken liberal views against Texas state politics, and carried out a long, personal war against what he saw as braggart Texans, religious prejudice, restraints on individual liberty, and an assault by the mechanized world on the human spirit.
An avowed realist, yet in many respects much more a local colorist than a serious artist, Dobie fell short of such contemporaries as Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton, and Georgia O'Keeffe, all of whom had similar but broader aesthetics than he.
On September 20, 1916, Dobie married Bertha McKee, a former college classmate; they had no children. Bertha Dobie became - in the words of Francis E. Abernethy - her husband's "chief editor and assistant, a contributor to some of the volumes he edited, and his substitute in class when he was off on the trail of some story. "
