Document Type

Book

Publication Date

1979

Abstract

El Paso is located at almost the farthest point of West Texas, where the Rio Grande River begins its sweep into the Big Bend country. Strangers find it a region extreme in its limitless supply of nothing. Even natives joke about the area. It is a place where “every living thing seems prepared to fight for its life. Even the plants go armed and hardly a shrub can be found without a spine or fang somewhere" (Roy Bean, p. 71). Texans do not expect a man from Minnesota with a Ph.D. from Harvard to write affectionately about the sand, sun, and stickers; to embrace that region’s history as his own; or to find anything amusing about the climate.

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