Literary Dallas

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Known as “The Emerald City,” Dallas has its own rich heritage peculiar to its founding on the prairies and the Trinity River, and editor Frances Brannen Vick has collected a cornucopia of all things Big D in Literary Dallas, the third in TCU Press’s “literary cities” series.

There is C. C. Slaughter who helped make Dallas a banking center; John Rosenfield, who made his city a haven for performing arts; Evelyn Oppenheimer, who made her career reviewing books; not to mention Frank X. Tolbert, both Chili King and writer.

Natalie Ornish writes of the merchants who made Dallas a city where haute couture is comme il faut, but, where, as Prudence Macintosh avers, it is also possible to live a perfectly happy life and never wear a ball gown.

Historians and journalists have interpreted the city for generations, and you will find A. C. Greene, Bob Compton, Stanley Walker, Kent Biffle, Paul Crume and Jay Milner, among others.

The pivotal event in Dallas was the Kennedy assassination, and Vick researched the journalists, writers, poets and observers who tackled this subject, including Jim Lehrer, Bryan Woolley, and Lawrence Wright, to name a few.

Fiction set in Dallas has been wide and deep. Authors explore various backdrops, and from a Catholic church to an English manor to local bars—and all the places in between—Dallas is covered.