Literary Austin

Don Graham brings together the history, color, and character of Texas’s capital city since 1839 when it was selected, on the advice of Mirabeau B. Lamar, as the site for a new capital of the then-Republic of Texas.

Essays, fiction, and poetry reveal the variety of literary responses to Austin through the decades and are organized in a roughly chronological fashion to reveal the themes, places, and personalities that have defined the life of the city.

Austin was always about three things—natur...