Texas Originals

In 1888, the historical novel Remember the Alamo was published to popular and critical acclaim. The novel's unlikely author was Amelia Barr, a British writer who lived in Texas in the mid-nineteenth century. To support herself after her husband and three of her children died of yellow fever in Galveston, she launched a remarkably successful writing career. In her memoir, completed at age eighty, she wrote that she hoped her life story might help "any sad or doubtful woman to outleap her own shadow, and to stand bravely out in the sunshine to meet her destiny."