But he wanted to get in. He wanted to be urbane and careless. He wanted to wear well-cut clothes. He wanted to be a gentleman.-- Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel Part 1Who Was W.M. Matthews? Mississippi State University – then Mississippi A&M College – entered...

Here’s what I want. I notice you changed your name. I want you to keep your new name. I guess you made up someplace you came from – well, that’s where you came from… You figure you died and now you’re somebody else and we’ll get along fine. -- John Steinbeck, East of...

 He was surrounded by a world that was both beautiful and terrifying, a land of secrets and shadows, where the line between civilization and savagery was thin and easily crossed--Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim Part 3Guy Town Miss Blanche Dumont became a sex worker in Austin,...

In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one’s eternity) I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a...

In this part of the story there are living ghosts as characters, and the story doesn’t come out quite the way either the ghosts or non-ghosts expected. -- Norman MacLean, Young Men and Fire Part 5 The Austin Athletics of 1893 Austin lacked a minor league baseball club...

It had the fine authority of provincialism – the provincialism of an older South. Nothing mattered but the State: the State was a mighty empire, a rich kingdom – there was, beyond, a remote and semi-barbaric world.-- Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel Part 6The Cadet...

People who don’t know think it is easy to be a madam – just sit in a big chair and drink beer and take half the money the girls make, they think. But it’s not like that at all.-- John Steinbeck, East of Eden Part 7Uncivil Matters As the Gay ‘90s opened, Blanche...

“Abdication! One third of the alphabet!” coldly quipped the King, with the trace of an accent. “The answer is no. I prefer the unknown quantity of exile.”-- Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin Part 8Happy Hollow Meets the Maroon and White Austin Mayor John McDonald ordered City...

The traveller is looked upon as a bird of passage, whose visit is short, and which the vanity of the visited wishes to make agreeable. All is show, all false, and all made up.-- Benjamin Disraeli, The Young Duke Part 9The Duke The man who became Wilson Matthews, one...

It was the finest place with all its old provincialism, the bare austerity of its whitewashed dormitory rooms, its unfurnished spareness, its old brick and its campus well, its world remotion in the Piedmont uplands of an ancient state. It beat any other place “all...