Texas Originals

Raised in Houston, Mickey Leland was committed to providing jobs for minorities and health care for the poor. After winning Barbara Jordan's seat in the U.S. Congress in 1978, he fought tirelessly to end global starvation.

The quiet cotton farming community of Wharton, Texas, is the touchstone for the career of playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote. He wrote plays about everyday people living in small Texas towns like his boyhood home, and his work was praised for its authenticity. "I believe very deeply in the human spirit," he once said. "I've known people that the world has thrown everything at. . . . And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and they don't ask quarters."

Writer and editor Willie Morris was born in Mississippi and made his name in New York, but he left an indelible mark on Texas journalism. Morris served as editor of the Daily Texan and the Texas Observer during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. "Texas was where I reached maturity," he later recalled. Writing about "politics, the ambivalent and exposed world of the politician . . . taught me about the complexity of human affairs, about the irrelevancy of most dogmatic formulas, about loyalty and courage and devotion to human causes."

Writer Mary Austin Holley introduced English-speaking readers of the 1830s and '40s to Texas, which she called a land of "surpassing beauty . . . a splendid country." Sadly, she died of yellow fever in 1846 and never settled in the place that had captured her heart, but her work provides invaluable accounts of life in early Texas.

According to one of his fans, actor and Texas native Zachary Scott had an air of sophistication that made him look like he had "been born in a dinner jacket." Best known for portraying scoundrels, playboys, and villains, Scott was one of Texas's most recognizable faces during Hollywood's golden age.

Scholar and folklorist John Mason Brewer was born in Goliad in 1896. Over his fifty-year career, Brewer almost single-handedly preserved the African American folklore of his home state. His books serve as a timeless record of Texas storytelling, and powerful proof of what he called "folklore as a living force."

Historian Carlos E. Castañeda changed how we think of the Southwest. Through exhaustive and groundbreaking research, he told the story of the Texas-Mexico borderlands as one of shared culture and heritage, rather than conflict and division.

Born about 1845, Comanche leader Quanah Parker lived two vastly different lives: the first as a warrior among the Plains Indians of Texas, and the second as a pragmatic leader who sought a place for his people in a rapidly changing America.

A master of color, shading, and detail, Texas painter Frank Reaugh recorded what he called "the broad opalescent prairies" as he saw them more than a century ago. His most famous works feature the Texas longhorn in its natural habitat, the Texas plains.

Born in Galveston in 1894, King Vidor grew up with the movies. Over the course of his career, he directed both silent and sound films and worked with many of Hollywood's top stars, from Charlie Chaplin to Audrey Hepburn.

According to J. Frank Dobie, the writer and naturalist Roy Bedichek "liked to cook outdoors, eat outdoors, sleep outdoors, look and listen outdoors, [and] be at one . . . with the first bob-whiting at dawn." Born in 1878 and raised in Waco, Bedichek is best known for his 1947 book Adventures with a Texas Naturalist, a classic of American nature writing.

That Houston is a destination for art lovers is due in part to the generosity of Dominique and John de Menil, a French couple who left their Nazi-occupied homeland in 1941, ultimately settling in Houston. Their museum, the Menil Collection, remains true to their vision of art as a spiritual pursuit.

African American leader Norris Wright Cuney forged a remarkable career in post-Civil War Texas. Born into slavery in 1846, he nonetheless studied law and became a civic and political force in the years following Reconstruction.

Critics call Texas-born writer Katherine Anne Porter a "poet of the story." Her carefully crafted short fiction earned her the highest acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her most accomplished stories spring from her childhood in central Texas—what she once called her "native land of the heart."

Texas revolutionary Juan Seguín was a politician, a soldier, a land speculator, a businessman, and a suspected traitor. Yet he was undoubtedly a hero and died an honored veteran. The perplexing contrasts of Seguín's life illustrate how complicated loyalty could be during the struggle for Texas independence—especially for Tejano citizens of the Republic.

Called "the Storyteller of the Southwest," James Frank Dobie was born in 1888 on a ranch in Live Oak County. Throughout his life, he lived astride two worlds: the old-time Texas of his family's cattle ranch and the state's modern centers of scholarly learning. The focus of Dobie's career was to record and publicize the disappearing folklore of the Southwest.

"Belle Starr was the most desperate woman that ever figured on the borders," declared an 1889 news report that she’d been shot dead by an assassin. Confirmed details of her life are few. But after her death at age forty, her legend grew, and she became known as "Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen."

The Gutenberg Bible, completed in 1454, is the first substantial book printed with movable type. Of the twenty-one complete copies in existence, one is on view to the public at The University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center. This book—and the center that houses it—are the proud legacy of Chancellor Harry Huntt Ransom, "The Great Acquisitor."

The German army considered Pointe du Hoc a perfect spot for defending the coast of France from Allied forces during WWII. The Germans placed six cannons on the point and thought the position secure. And it was—until June 1944, when Texan James Earl Rudder was ordered to take the point with his 2nd Ranger Battalion.

Born in 1867, folklorist John Lomax spent his life collecting songs "around chuck wagons, up hollers and down in river bottoms, on levee and railroad, in the saloons, churches, and penitentiaries of the South and Southwest." Upon his death in 1948, the New York Times wrote, "If anybody ever did, John Lomax really heard America singing."