Back to Texas
1977
Prose
Bear Hug Books
Special edition of 750
Printed at the West Coast Print Center
Typesetting by George Mattingly
Drawings by Chuck Miller
“If more writers were writing like Bobbie Louise Hawkins — economically and truly about the only human things that interest us in prose: the past, the family, love, hate, duty, forgiveness — then maybe a few more thousand Americans would be reading narrative fiction and nourishing themselves on the oldest of all safe and enduring pleasures: news and fun and consolation. Start with Back to Texas if you’re low on any of the above mentioned fields.”
—Reynolds Price
“If there is any single work of prose being written that I most want to read in completion it’s Bobbie Louise Hawkins’s Back to Texas book.”
—Fielding Dawson, The World #30, July 1976
“A wise and wonderful book [Back to Texas]. These adventures sneak, holler, hurt, love, and outsmart each other through this book with a clean, hard look and sound as detailed as an imagist poem cut with a whipsaw wit bent on maintaining itself and its loved ones no matter what. A ceaseless and deep-stiffing affection for the common effort. The fine line of this book’s attention and its rigorous modesty combine with a stunning sense of spoken language to crisp-out a full-scaled life as memorable as it is well written.”
— SoHo Weekly News