Graves, John, 1920-2013

Born August 6, 1920 in Fort Worth, Texas, John Alexander Graves III grew up in that city until moving away to attend college in 1938. He graduated from Rice Institute (now Rice University), served as a Marine in World War II, and earned an M.A. at Columbia University in 1948. Graves taught English from 1948 to 1950 at The University of Texas at Austin, then left to pursue a career as a freelance writer. In November of 1957 Graves completed a three-week canoe trip down part of the Brazos River that he feared was about to be changed forever by dams. His narrative chronicle of the trip was first published as a magazine article in Holiday, and later Graves added history, philosophy and folklore which resulted in his first major book, Goodbye to a River (1960). The book attracted national attention and critical praise for its original style. In the meantime, Graves took a teaching job at Texas Christian University, married Jane Cole (his second marriage) and purchased the first of his limestone acres in Somervell County near the town of Glen Rose. After three years assisting in and writing for a U.S. government study of pollution of the Potomac River, Graves returned to Texas and focused on converting his country acreage from a weekend getaway into a permanent home with a manageable farm and cattle ranch. His observations and ruminations about his relationship with the land as a farmer and rancher led to the publication of his second major book, Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land (1974). Starting in 1976, Graves again focused on life in the country in a series of essays that were published in Texas Monthly magazine. The essays were collected and published for his third major book, From a Limestone Ledge: Some Essays and Other Ruminations about Country Life in Texas (1980). Although Graves has not published an extensive number of books, his contributions to magazines, books and anthologies spans over five decades. Two of his most famous magazine pieces, The Last Running and Blue & Some Other Dogs, later became their own books, published first by Encino Press. Another well-received essay, Recollections of a Texas Bird Glimpser, written for the art book, Of Birds and Texas (1986), transformed into a limited edition book, Self-Portrait, With Birds (1991). In 1996 the University of Texas Press published A John Graves Reader, which gathered together fiction and non-fiction pieces, both published and unpublished. More recently, Graves wrote text for the photography books Texas Rivers (2002) and Texas Hill Country (2003), and in 2004 Knopf published his memoir, Myself and Strangers, which focused on his years abroad as a freelance writer.

From the description of John Graves Papers, 1920-2006 (bulk 1946-2004). (Texas State University-San Marcos). WorldCat record id: 32458711

Texas writer and professor.

From the description of Papers, 1957-75, 1995. (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC); University of Texas at Austin). WorldCat record id: 122453198

Texas writer John Alexander Graves III was born August 6, 1920, in Fort Worth. He received a B.A. from Rice University in 1942 and then served in the U. S. Marine Corps during World War II. After being wounded while serving in Saipan, Graves returned to the United States and enrolled at Columbia University; he completed an M.A. in literature in 1948. From 1948-50 Graves taught English at the University of Texas at Austin. Following that, he worked as a freelance writer and travelled to Mexico, Spain, England, and other areas. In 1958, Graves married Jane Cole, a designer for Neiman Marcus; they have two daughters, Helen and Sally. Graves was an adjunct professor of English at Texas Christian University from 1958-65. He then spent three years working for Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall as a consultant and writer on preservation and conservation of the Potomac River Basin.

Home Place: A Background Sketch in Support of a Proposed Restoration of Pioneer Buildings in Fort Worth, Texas was published in 1958. As a freelance writer, Graves was published in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Holiday, The New Yorker, and Town and Country, among other periodicals. His short story The Green Fly was reprinted in Prize Stories 1955: The O. Henry Awards, and The Aztec Dog was included in the 1961 edition of Prize Stories. Graves's first and best-known book, Goodbye to a River, was published by Knopf in 1960. A personal and historical account of a stretch of the Brazos River, Goodbye to a River won the 1961 Collins Award of the Texas Institute of Letters and earned Graves a reputation for writing in a naturalistic style about the relationship between people and land. The Water Hustlers, a book about the impact of water resource development on the environment in California, Texas, and New York, was published by the Sierra Club in 1971. Graves's contribution to the book was titled Texas: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet and examined the 1968 Texas Water Plan.

In 1970, Graves moved from Fort Worth to live in a house he had constructed on 400 acres of land near Glen Rose, Texas. That land, which he called Hard Scrabble, was the subject of his next major book. Written in the same vein as Goodbye to a River, Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land (1974) is a collection of essays incorporating physical description, history, and philosophical comments, as well as fictional characterizations. Hard Scrabble, like Goodbye to a River, won a Texas Institute of Letters Collins Award.

Over the next few years, Graves continued to write essays and short pieces for publication. He wrote the text for Texas Heartland: A Hill Country Year (1975), which was a book of photographs taken at Paisano Ranch by Jim Bones, Jr., as well as the introduction to Landscapes of Texas: Photographs from Texas Highways Magazine (1980). A collection of essays Graves wrote for Texas Monthly magazine also was published in 1980, under the title From a Limestone Ledge: Some Essays and Other Ruminations about Country Life in Texas.

Other published works by Graves include The Last Running: A Story (1974), a fictionalized version of a segment of Goodbye to a River that was first published in Atlantic Monthly in June 1959 and reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 1960; and Blue and Some Other Dogs (1981), taken from From a Limestone Ledge. Graves contributed to The American Southwest, Cradle of Literary Art (1981) and wrote the forewards to A Thomason Sketchbook: Drawings (1969) and James T. De Shields' Cynthia Ann Parker (1991), among others. He provided the text for Of Birds and Texas (1986) and published another version of that text as Self-Portrait with Birds: Some Semi-Ornithological Recollections (1991).

John Graves's papers were acquired by the HRHRC in 1975 and 1976 through William Wittliff of the Encino Press. More information about John Graves and his work may be found in an interview with Patrick Bennett, published in Talking with Texas Writers: Twelve Interviews (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981), and in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983 (Gale Research Co., 1984).

From the guide to the John Graves Papers TXRC96-A0., 1957-75, 1995, (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin)