Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Hard Scrabble Observations on a Patch of Land by John Graves Hard Scrabble. “A kind of homemade book—imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. It’s a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook .” —Edward Hoagland, New York Times Book Review. “His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions.” — New Yorker. “If Goodbye to a River was in some sense Graves’s Odyssey , this book is his [version of Hesiod’s] Works and Days . It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris.” — Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book World. “ Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the ‘given’ creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster.” — Southwest Review. 1. By Way of Introduction 2. A Comment 3. Used to Be 4. The Forging of a Squireen 5. Of the Lay of Things, and a Creek 6. Ghosts 7. A Rooted Population 8. An Irrelevance 9. Hoof and Paw, Tooth and Claw, Little Creatures Everywhere 10. His Chapter 11. Helpers 12. 2 × 4 13. Another Irrelevance 14. The War with Mother N. 15. Interlude 16. The War Resumed 17. What Happened to Mother N.’s Own Boy? 18. Reality as Viewed Darkly Through Old Snuff-Bottle Shards Afterword by the Author (2002) This book may also be available on the following library platforms; check with your local library: Ebsco Proquest Overdrive 3M Cloud Library/bibliotheca. October 2013. ​There’s something intangible about the river that flows in most people’s souls, rising in the prolific spring of the mind, coursing through the veins of our experiences and pooling in our hearts. ​ Not surprisingly — given that the ancient bond between man and river formed the very nexus of civilization — some of the world’s greatest books have to do with rivers. Mark Twain made the Mississippi a character in his classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Joseph Conrad used a river in Heart of Darkness , and James Dickey did it in Deliverance . But those were all works of fiction. The late Texas writer John Graves, who died in his sleep at his Hard Scrabble ranch near Glen Rose on July 31, achieved literary immortality with his 1960 nonfiction book, Goodbye to a River . Nationally distributed by New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf when its author was in the 40th of the 92 years he would live, Goodbye to a River is Graves’ account of a canoe trip with a dog he referred to only as his “passenger” (the dachshund’s name was Watty) down part of the Brazos River. Considered as important and lasting a work as the 19th century existentialist Henry David Thoreau’s Walden , Graves’ book takes readers along the river with him as he explores its twists and turns and its sometimes bloody frontier history. Finding the universal in the local, he writes about the fish that swim in it, the wildlife that exists along its banks and, finally, the people who lived on or near it. He steps into his narrative as casually as someone wading out into the water on a gravel bar with this unpretentious beginning: “Most autumns, the water is low from the long dry summer, and you have to get out from time to time and wade, leading or dragging your boat through trickling shallows from one pool to the long channel-twisted pool below, hanging up occasionally on shuddering bars of quicksand, making six or eight miles in a day’s work, but if you go to the river at all, you tend not to mind.” John Graves on the Llano. Born John Alexander Graves III on Aug. 6, 1920, in Fort Worth, where his father owned a clothing store, he developed a lifelong love for the outdoors. The first river that drew him was the West Fork of the Trinity, where he spent a lot of time as a boy fishing and hunting. The next river that attracted young Graves was the Brazos, a wilder, more vigorous stream. When his family visited relatives in Cuero, he fished in the Guadalupe and hunted quail with his father’s brothers. Following high school, he went to Rice University. After graduating in 1942, the second-darkest year of World War II, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and served as a first lieutenant in the Pacific Theater. Fighting on the island of Saipan in 1944, he was almost killed when an enemy hand grenade was detonated by a Japanese soldier who had been playing dead. The young officer recovered from his wounds, but lost sight in his left eye and carried assorted small pieces of metal elsewhere in his body for the rest of his life. After the war, Graves spent some time in Mexico before moving to New York to get a master’s degree in English from Columbia University. Returning to Texas in 1948, he taught freshman English at the University of Texas at Austin for two years. After a short failed marriage, he went back to New York for a while before traveling abroad, spending most of his time in Spain. While in Europe he began writing magazine articles and finished a novel called A Speckled Horse that no one wanted to publish. Seeing himself as a future Ernest Hemingway-esque novelist, Graves threw himself into the expatriate lifestyle, but his sun never rose as that kind of writer. In 1957, Graves made what turned out to be an excellent career move and came home to Texas to help take care of his father, who had cancer. Not long after that, Graves got an assignment from Sports Illustrated (along with a $500 advance) to write an article about a canoe trip he planned to take down the Brazos below Possum Kingdom Dam. With a series of five dams planned for that section of the river downstream as far as Lake Whitney, Graves knew the stream would never be the same. The Brazos River. He pushed his canvas canoe into the river on the afternoon of Nov. 11, 1957, and spent the next three weeks on the river, covering 170-plus miles. In camp each evening, he wrote his observations down in a notebook, eventually filling several of them. The trip proved to be as interesting and personally meaningful as he thought it would be, but his editor at Sports Illustrated didn’t agree. Even after Graves rewrote some passages and cut others, the editor turned it down. Graves at least got to keep the advance, which back then was major money. Not entirely daunted, Graves proceeded to turn the trip into a book that hit the stores in October 1960 in time for holiday sales. It gained immediate recognition as an important work, winning the top book award from the Texas Institute of Letters the following year. It was also in the running for a National Book Award. The dams proposed for the stretch of river he had written about never were built. The former Marine did not pull any punches when it came to saying what he thought, including a warning that still echoes from his book: “We will be nearly finished, I think, when we stop understanding the old pull toward green things and living things, toward dirt and rain and heat and what they spawn.” The money Graves earned from Goodbye to a River eventually freed him from the teaching position at TCU he had held since 1958 and allowed him to buy 400 acres in the limestone hills of Somervell County southwest of Fort Worth, a worn-out farm he called Hard Scrabble. He cleared the land of as much invasive cedar as he could, built a house and moved to the property in 1970 with his wife, Jane, a former fashion designer for Neiman-Marcus, and their two daughters. As writer Jan Reid observed in the UT alumni magazine Alcalde , Graves was a writer who, in seeking to get as close to perfection as he could, “did not punish himself with yearning to be prolific.” Graves wrote only three other major books after Goodbye to a River , and all of those came more than a decade after publication of his first book. His second book was Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Piece of Land , a first-person account of his own, small part of Texas, the place where he would die. Published in 1974, Hard Scrabble , as its subtitle suggests, is a rumination on the land, from grasses and creeks to goats and hired hands. His next book was From a Limestone Ledge , a collection of essays published in 1980. Goodbye to a River and Graves’ second and third books have come to be known as the Brazos Trilogy. His fourth book was Myself and Strangers: A Memoir of Apprenticeship , published in 2004. He wrote seven other shorter books or anthologies, including The Water Hustlers (1971), Blue and Some Other Dogs (1981), A John Graves Reader (1996), The Last Running (1990), Texas Rivers (2002), Texas Hill Country (2003) and My Dogs and Guns (2007). While not weighing down library shelves with an extraordinarily long row of books, Graves continued to put interesting and well-ordered words on paper. He wrote for a variety of magazines, including the long-defunct Holiday, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Texas Monthly and Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine. Fittingly, six of the pieces Graves wrote for this magazine had to do with rivers: “The Canadian River” (March 1999), “The Pecos” (December 1999), “Life on the Llano” (Novem​ber 2000), “Riverfolk of the Neches” (May 2001), “Song of the Sabinal” (October 2001) and “Vein of History” (December 2001). Those articles became the book Texas Rivers , with photographs by Texas Parks & Wildlife contributing photographer Wyman Meinzer. The Neches River. Graves also wrote a long essay, “State of Nature,” published in the December 1992 issue of this magazine to celebrate the magazine’s 50th anniversary. Though he would live another two decades, Graves wrote from the perspective of a man who had spent most of his life in Texas — much of it outdoors — and along the way had seen tremendous change in the state’s environment. As he put it, that change included having “witnessed a great deal of ecological decline and damage but also a degree of restitution.” While he praised Texas’ many fish-full manmade reservoirs, reading between the lines of what he had to say about rivers shows Graves still had reservations about building dams. Though he did have concerns, he ended his essay with an expression of optimism for the future of the Texas outdoors. “There does appear to be room for hope,” Graves wrote. “Where it lies is in the shift toward understanding and gentler use … in relation to hunters and fishermen, and which is going to have to prevail among all people who make use of the outdoors, if in the long run anything worth having is to be saved.” Hard Scrabble. In 1960, when John Graves's first book, “Goodbye to a River,” came out, reviewers ought to have had climbed their bell towers like Quasimodo and kicked and pummeled the big bells in celebration. There are a handful of other writers, in fact, who might have written as beautifully about a canoe trip on a twist of river that was about to be damned, though not about Graves's own Brazos. But his achievement was unique because, unlike the others, Graves kept his head and wasn't scathing. He remembered that part. of a naturalist's responsibility is to feel a due humility in the face of the futdre as well as simply in the face of nature as we happen to know her, since we don't know what is to come. His second book, “Hard Scrabble,” is now published, 14 years later. It's as tranquil, but more crowded, being concerned with his own 400 hard scrabble acres near the Paluxy River in north‐central Texas, about what he's seen and done on his own spread and the frontier and Comanche history nearby. It is a kind of homemade book—clumsy once in a while in the way it's put together or rhetorically empurpled—imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. Naturalist writers are seldom considerable thinkers, or even experts. What the best of them, like Graves, do have, however, and what can give their books exceptional staying power, is a tone that suits the book. As naturalists, they are engaged in a search for such a tone to begin with—a tone to take with the natural world, a way to fall in step with older, tried and true rhythms. And so whenever they succeed, a life, a _grace, an impetus, is lent to their efforts surpassing what they might have accomplished otherwise. The book, becoming a chip on the sea or on the rolling, grand prairie, begins to rise and fall with strength over and above the author's. Graves calls himself Squireen, Head Varmint and worse. Mostly he is putting in cedar‐post fencing, telling white‐whiskey stories, building stone house and pine outbuildings, reclaiming old fields from the scrub cedar. “Then I would go bathe at the waterfall and would come back in twilight to eat crackers with something straight out of a can or jar, too tired and obsessed for hunger, and would lie down and sleep, halfwaking pleasantly sometimes to a big wind or a fox's bark or the bumping beneath the cot of an old armadillo with a stub tail, dog‐gnawed, who grubbed in the oak's leaf‐litter, or to a screech owl, who like all his tribe did not screech at all but bubbled and gently wailed.” It used to be that Texas writers, with a notable exception or two, stuck in Texas to succor that state's ego. Now (and perhaps especially after the ascension to power of the late Lyndon Johnson, which gave some of them more confidence) they are‐likely to make the journey “up East.” Talents as different as Larry King's and Donald Barthelme's enrich the national harmonics as J. Frank Dobie's did not. But because the questions that are of interest ebb and flow, it is again particularly fun to hear from John Graves, down on White Cedar Creek in the Tonkawa Nation. He's argumentative and garrulous and quirky, as naturalist writers tend to be, but one has the feeling with him, as with all of the best of them, that after he is gone, his children, grandchildren, great‐grandchildren, will handle this book with an affection great‐grandchildren don't usually show to their ancestors’ novels and poems. It's a galloping, spontaneous book, in its own way as good, for example as Josephine Johnson's “The Inland Island,” or Henry Beston's “The Outermost House"—all being on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev's “A Sportsman's Notebook.” Texas author and Rice alumnus John Graves dies at 92; wrote ‘Goodbye to a River’ Texas author and Rice alum John Graves ’42, whose book about a canoe trip down the Brazos River in the late 1950s is regarded as a classic, died July 30 at his small farm outside Glen Rose, Texas. Described by the Houston Chronicle as “the dean of Texas letters,” Graves was 92 and had been in declining health for several years. He was born in Fort Worth on Aug. 6, 1920, and grew up there and on his grandparents’ farm near Cuero, Texas. He entered the Rice Institute in 1938 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English. A spring 1995 profile on Graves by Director of Multicultural Community Relations David Medina ’83 in Rice’s alumni magazine recounted Graves’ initial hopes to major in petroleum engineering. “Everyone was thinking about getting a job at that point,” Graves recalled. His aspirations were cut short by registrar Samuel McCann, who quizzed him about his interests. “At the end of 15 minutes, McCann told Graves he would be ‘miserable’ in engineering,” Medina wrote. Instead, Graves signed up for general academic courses and pursued his interests in English and history. He developed close ties with three professors who mentored and inspired him: English professors Alan McKillop and George Williams and historian David Potters. In the magazine profile, Graves remembered living an almost idyllic life at Rice and described life on campus as “pretty, fit for dreaming and ignoring strife.” After graduating, Graves joined the Marine Corps; as a first lieutenant in the Pacific, he was injured on the island of Saipan and lost sight in one eye. After the war, he received a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1947 and then taught at the University of Texas at Austin for two years. He lived in other parts of the U.S. and abroad before returning to Texas in 1957 to care for his father, who was ill with cancer, in Fort Worth. He took a job teaching creative writing at Texas Christian University. In November 1957, Graves and his dog completed a three-week canoe trip along the upper Brazos at a time when he feared that dams would destroy the river as he knew it. His description of the trip was first published as a magazine article in Holiday. With the addition of old settlers’ tales, Indian stories and musings about life past and present, Graves turned the article into “Goodbye to a River.” The book attracted national attention and critical praise and won the 1961 Carr P. Collins Award of the Texas Institute of Letters and was nominated for a National Book Award. In 1970, Graves and his family moved to a rundown farm outside Glen Rose, near Fort Worth, that Graves named Hard Scrabble. His account of restoring the farm and his observations about rural life became “Hard Scrabble: Observations on a Patch of Land” in 1974. Other books include “From a Limestone Ledge” and “Myself and Strangers.” “John Graves is widely regarded as the finest writer Texas has ever produced,” said Lisa Slappey ’01, a lecturer in Rice’s English Department who has written about and taught Graves’ books. “He is a literary giant, especially within the American environmental movement. His work, much of it about life along a relatively unknown stretch of the Brazos made famous in ‘Goodbye to a River,’ teaches readers the importance of our relationships to our home places. Whether we embrace or reject our origins, whether we behave as stewards or antagonists toward the land and its inhabitants, we are heirs to our physical places and we bear the marks of this inheritance throughout our lives.” Graves’ books enjoy enduring popularity at Rice’s Fondren Library, said Assistant University Librarian for Research Services Kerry Keck. “The circulation of his books is notable, especially for contemporary Texas history, culture and the environment,” Keck said. “That level of use customarily is seen only with literature ‘core course’ authors such as Shakespeare, Melville and, as (to whom) Graves is sometimes compared, Thoreau.” Survivors include his wife, the former Jane Cole, and two daughters, Helen and Sally, who graduated from Rice in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in biology and English. John Graves. A Guide to the John Graves Papers, 1920-2006 (Bulk dates: 1946-2004) Complete inventory available in PDF or EAD format. Creator: Graves, John. Title: John Graves Papers. Dates: 1920-2006 (Bulk dates: 1946-2004) Abstract: Forty-nine boxes of typescripts, galley proofs, correspondence, printed material, photographs, scrapbook material, notes, and artifacts, among other items, document almost the entire writing career of John Graves (1920-2013). Identification: Collection 010. Extent: 49 boxes (33.5 linear feet) Language: Almost all documents are written in English; a small number are in Spanish. Biographical Sketch/Historical Sketch. 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) with a B.A. in English in 1942, then entered the Marine Corps and served in the Pacific theater until being wounded by a Japanese grenade on the island of Saipan. After the service, Graves traveled to Mexico for a few months then attended Columbia University, earning an M.A. in English from there in 1948. He began his professional writing career while still a graduate student by publishing a short story, titled “Quarry,” in The New Yorker in 1947. Graves taught English from 1948 to 1950 at The University of Texas at Austin, but left academia and Texas behind to spend a year freelance writing in New York City. From January 1953 to July 1955 he spent abroad, living mostly in Spain, including the Canary Islands for some months on a resident colony of writers and artists. During these years he wrote articles for publications like Holiday and Town and Country but also worked on fiction, including a semi-autobiographical novel, The Spotted Horse. Graves concentrated on finishing the novel after returning to the United States, but his agent rejected the final manuscript and Graves soon came to realize the novel was not publishable as a whole. In the spring of 1957 Graves returned home to help care for his gravely ill father. In November of that year, 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. It won the Carr P. Collins Award of the Texas Institute of Letters in 1961 and was nominated for a National Book Award that year. 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. In that time he also contributed to journals, magazines and books with introductions, articles, and essays—work that has continued to the present day. 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). Hard Scrabble describes both the promise and adversity of country life, touching on subjects like animals, tools, construction, weather, water, ecology, agriculture, and migrant workers. 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 examined topics such as fences, meat, tobacco, cows, chickens, dogs, and bees, and were collected and published for Graves’ third major book, From a Limestone Ledge: Some Essays and Other Ruminations about Country Life in Texas (1980). Some essays follow up topics which he discussed in Hard Scrabble, but all focus on the “more or less country things which came to interest” Graves. From a Limestone Ledge was nominated for an American Book Award. Although Graves has not published an extensive number of books, his contributions to magazines, books and anthologies spans over five decades. He has written introductions and narratives for a number of books and reports, often on Texas history and Texas environment, such as Cowboy Life on the Western Plains, Texas Heartland: A Hill Country Year and The Water Hustlers. Two of Graves’ most famous magazine pieces, “The Last Running” and “Blue and 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, including a long, reworked excerpt from his failed novel, The Spotted Horse. 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. John Graves is one of the most important Southwestern writers. Three of his early short stories were collected in the O. Henry award series. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1963 and a Rockefeller fellowship in 1972. Numerous awards and recognitions have followed him throughout his writing career. Although he is generally considered a regional and nature writer due to his settings and subjects, his style, which incorporates fiction, folklore, autobiography, philosophy, and observation, defies provincial or topical boundaries. Perhaps the best example of this is Goodbye to a River, which has never gone out of print since first being published in 1960, and is still celebrated for its keen ruminations on the historical, attitudinal and natural worlds that intertwined around Graves as he canoed down the river. John Graves passed away in 2013, survived by his wife Jane Cole of New York, and two daughters, Helen and Sally. Scope and Content Note. Forty-nine boxes of typescripts, galley proofs, correspondence, printed material, photographs, scrapbook material, notes, and artifacts, among other items, document almost the entire writing career of John Graves (1920- ). The collection has been arranged into seven series: Writings (1946-2004, n.d.), Correspondence (1943-2006, n.d.), Institutional Activities (1960-1998), Awards and Honors (1961-2004), Personal Materials (ca. 1920-2002, n.d.), Clippings (ca. 1940-2004, n.d.), and Writings by Others (1942-2002, n.d.). The author’s original order has been maintained where possible. The collection gives an overview of Graves’ literary career, and with numerous drafts of many of his books, essays and short stories, it is particularly strong in illustrating his writing process. Another strength of the collection lies in its documentation of the editorial process, illustrated by the correspondence with publishers and agents found in both the Works and Correspondence series. Numerous letters between Graves and fans, family and friends were added to the collection in 2007, making the Correspondence series at ten boxes the second most voluminous. Other highlights of the collection are personal photographs and journals in the Personal Materials series. SERIES I: Writings, 1946-2004, n.d. Boxes 1-21, 43, 47. The Writings series includes research notes, typed manuscripts, galley proofs, printed materials, correspondence, and other materials chronicling Graves’ literary contributions from his earliest short stories to his more recent essays and memoir. Materials from all of his books are included; additional document boxes contain Graves’ short stories, articles, speeches, book introductions, and notes. Many of these materials were annotated by Graves with personal comments when he donated the materials to Bill Wittliff. Manuscript materials relating to the books Graves is credited as writing or co-writing make up the first sub-series. Materials are arranged alphabetically by book title. Of particular interest in the files pertaining to his first book Goodbye to a River are photographs taken by Graves during his trip down the Brazos River, the plate proofs of the first edition, and two printed articles written before the publication of the book. There are also drafts of his second book, Hard Scrabble, and his 2004 memoir, Myself and Strangers. The materials relating to From a Limestone Ledge have to do with the publication of the book itself; materials relating to the essays that were previously published in Texas Monthly are in the following sub-series. Likewise, materials under Blue & Some Other Dogs, The Last Running, and Self-Portrait, With Birds have to do with the book versions of these writings, not the original versions, which can be found in the next sub-series. The General sub-series is devoted to the many short stories, essays, book introductions, tributes, and unpublished pieces written by Graves, and spans almost six decades. This subseries is also the largest in the collection, filling eleven document boxes, plus oversize. The works within it are arranged alphabetically by title, usually according to the official published title, but sometimes by a book title if Graves’ piece is an untitled introduction, or a draft title if the piece is unpublished. Many of these files contain correspondence, notes and research as well as typescripts and drafts. Some files also include or are limited to the publication itself that published it, or a clipping or photocopy of the published piece. Graves’ work for Texas Monthly is thoroughly documented in the General sub-series, including the typescripts, galleys, clippings and correspondence he kept in two binders, covering ten years of published essays in the magazine. The manuscript of Graves’ first published short story, “Quarry,” can be found in this sub-series, as well as one of his most famous pieces, “The Last Running,” in both fiction and screenplay formats. Note that the long essay, “Notes & Scraps from a Personal Journal, 1946-1956,” is restricted from access until five years after the death of Mr. Graves. The third and last sub-series covers speeches that Graves wrote and delivered, arranged alphabetically by the event or occasion. Like the previous two sub-series, these files contain drafts, correspondence, published forms, notes and other materials related to their subjects. SERIES II: Correspondence, 1943-2006 (bulk 1959-2006), n.d. The Correspondence series contains letters that highlight Graves’ writing career, with letters to and from publishers, agents, fellow writers, fans, event organizers and others. Insights into Graves’ personal life and thoughts are also found in letters between Graves and longtime friends and family members. Graves kept carbon copies and later computer printout copies of many of his letters to others, so the researcher gets both sides of the letter-writing dialogue, in these folders and elsewhere in the collection where correspondence is included. The vast majority of the correspondence is filed alphabetically by last name, though in a handful of cases by institution name, event name, or subject. Within the folders that are labeled with a range of names the correspondence is arranged and labeled in smaller folders. Folders that have just one name written on them means the volume of letters warranted its own folder (or in some cases, more than one folder. The correspondence in the John Schaffner file is notable for chronicling the agent-writer relationship. Schaffner was Graves’ agent until 1979, and this file, covering eighteen years, highlights their personal and professional association during that time. Writers Rick Bass, Angus Cameron, Nick Lyons and John N. Cole have considerable amounts of correspondence with Graves, as does writer and photographer Bill Wittliff, who has also been a close friend of and sometime collaborator with Graves through the years. Though less voluminous, the letters between Graves and Cormac McCarthy reveal a respect and kinship between the two men. Daughters Helen Graves and Sally Jackson also have a considerable amount of correspondence in this series. Fleet Lentz and Abe Rothberg each have multiple folders, making evident their important friendships with Graves. Another significant friendship documented in letters is that of Graves and Samuel Hynes, who have been close friends since their days together at Columbia University. These letters are arranged in two parts, one restricted and one not. Letters donated by Mr. Hynes himself for inclusion in the John Graves Papers are restricted from access until after the deaths of both gentlemen. There are also two other, unrelated letters placed at the end of the series that are restricted until 30 years after the death of Mr. Graves. SERIES III: Institutional Activities, 1960-98. There are two main parts to this series: Texas Institute of Letters, and Classes & Workshops. The former sub-series deals with Graves’ membership in and activities with T.I.L., including two folders of his 1971-73 presidency of the organization; while the latter sub-series contains syllabus information and notes related to two courses and one workshop taught by Graves. The files in these two sub-series are arranged chronologically. The last part in Institutional Activities is a file relating to the “John Graves Essay Contest,” conducted by The University of Texas Press. Graves was the judge of the final three-place winners of the contest. SERIES IV: Awards and Honors, 1961-2004 (bulk 1975-97) This series is arranged chronologically, and contains mainly invitations, programs and photographs related to awards and honors bestowed upon Graves. A significant portion of this series deals with the Dallas Museum of Art’s “John Graves Day,” celebrated in May 1995, and includes video recordings of the event as well as correspondence, clippings and programs. SERIES V: Personal Materials, ca. 1920-2002 (bulk 1938-99), n.d. Boxes 34-43, 47-48. Notebooks, legal papers, financial papers, photographs, journals, objects and academic records make up the majority of the materials in this series. Graves’ academic career is well documented through grade reports and written recommendations, class notes from undergraduate and graduate school, and his Columbia University Master’s thesis on William Faulkner. Of particular interest in this series is the notebook Graves used while traveling in Europe and his journal of a trip down the Rio Conchos, as well as many copy prints of family photographs. Objects of note include Graves’ Royal Standard typewriter and the paddle and tent he used during his canoe trip down the Brazos River in 1957. Materials in this series are arranged chronologically according to sub-series. The “Reading Notes” journals in Box 38 may not be viewed or duplicated without the permission of John Graves or Bill Wittliff. SERIES VI: Clippings, ca. 1940-2004, n.d. Photocopies—and the originals, when available—of newspaper and magazine clippings related mostly to Graves’ writing career can be found in this series. The clippings are filed in chronological order. A number of issues of entire magazines are kept in Box 47, due to their large sizes. SERIES VII: Writings by Others, 1942-2002, n.d. This series consists mainly of draft photocopies and printouts of other people’s novels, essays, screenplays and poetry. Also included are correspondence, clippings, research, notes and page proofs. A handful are essays written about Graves, but the majority of the files are creative works that Graves has proofread or for which he has offered promotional comments. The typescript A Texas Rancher in Durango, Mexico may not be viewed without permission from John Graves or Bill Wittliff. Some materials restricted. Please contact the SWWC for information about access. John Graves Papers, Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University-San Marcos. Donations since 1988. Donors: John and Jane Graves, Bill Wittliff, David Bowen, Dwain Kelly, and Samuel Hynes. Previously processed by Jennifer B. Patterson, January 1994, Amanda York, 2002. Inventory Revised by Brandy Harris, 2005. Reprocessed by Joel Minor in 2007 with 10.5 linear feet of additional materials donated by Graves in 2006. Notes to Researchers. Books in the John Graves Collection have been cataloged separately. See also the Bill Wittliff Collection, Accession Numbers 88-052, 89-023, 91-001, 91-009, 91-046, 91-128, 92-044, and 92-053 for photographs of John Graves. See 93-104 for Dorys Grover’s collection of research materials on Graves and Southwestern literature. See the Bud Shrake Collection for a letter from Graves to Shrake. See Wittliff 98-042 for Ned Blessing television series script by WDW and Graves. The Southwestern Writers Collection also holds materials related to the production of A John Graves Reader, including copies of numerous works, correspondence, drafts, galleys and publicity materials, in the UT Press Collection of A John Graves Reader (Collection 090).