Dick Holland

The crowd at the boarding gate for the flight from Hobby Airport to New Orleans had the feel of a group of friendly commuters who already knew each other. The man standing next to us in Group “B” kept using … Read More

Fifty years ago the University of Texas was entering a golden era led by the dynamic Harry Ransom, who created one of the great libraries in the world and brought a first-class faculty to Austin. The shining light of this … Read More

Texas Foreign Policy, 1842 BY DICK HOLLAND The Diezmo: A Novel By Rick Bass Houghton Mifflin 208 pages, $22. ouston native Rick Bass, born in 1958, is one of the most lauded American writers of his generation, although few of … Read More

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The Age of Bob BY DICK HOLLAND Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster 293 pages, $24 Dylan’s Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks Ecco 517 pages, $26.95 t last count there were over ninety books published about … Read More

Texas Literary Outlaws: Six Writers in the Sixties and Beyond Steven L. Davis’s compelling account of the lives and works of Billie Lee Brammer, Gary Cartwright, Peter Gent, Dan Jenkins, Larry L. King, and Edwin (Bud) Shrake takes us back … Read More

Lately self-absorption has been taking some licks. A couple of months back the always self-satisfied New York Times Magazine devoted a special issue to what they called “The Me Millennium.” The concept was muddled, but appeared to be that the … Read More

AIR GUITAR:Essays on Art & Democracy. Back in the late fifties and early sixties, there was a magic moment when the University of Texas seemed full of promise. Under the leadership of Harry Ransom, the liberal arts and the libraries … Read More

STATE OF MIND: Texas Literature & Culture. Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Larry McMurtry’s In A Narrow Grave – the book that changed everything in the polite world of Texas books and writing. Until then, the Texas branch … Read More