Splendor in the Short Grass
Splendor in the Short Grass
The Grover Lewis Reader
Honorable Mention, Carr P. Collins Award for Best Book of Nonfiction, 2006
Grover Lewis was one of the defining voices of the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. His wry, acutely observed, fluently written essays for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice set a standard for other writers of the time, including Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Eszterhas, Timothy Ferris, Chet Flippo, and Tim Cahill, who said of Lewis, "He was the best of us." Pioneering the "on location" reportage that has become a fixture of features about moviemaking and live music, Lewis cut through the celebrity hype and captured the real spirit of the counterculture, including its artificiality and surprising banality. Even today, his articles on Woody Guthrie, the Allman Brothers, the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, directors Sam Peckinpah and John Huston, and the filming of The Last Picture Show and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest remain some of the finest writing ever done on popular culture.
To introduce Grover Lewis to a new generation of readers and collect his best work under one cover, this anthology contains articles he wrote for Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Playboy, Texas Monthly, and New West, as well as excerpts from his unfinished novel The Code of the West and his incomplete memoir Goodbye If You Call That Gone and poems from the volume I'll Be There in the Morning If I Live. Jan Reid and W. K. Stratton have selected and arranged the material around themes that preoccupied Lewis throughout his life—movies, music, and loss. The editors' biographical introduction, the foreword by Dave Hickey, and a remembrance by Robert Draper discuss how Lewis's early struggles to escape his working-class, anti-intellectual Texas roots for the world of ideas in books and movies made him a natural proponent of the counterculture that he chronicled so brilliantly. They also pay tribute to Lewis's groundbreaking talent as a stylist, whose unique voice deserves to be more widely known by today's readers.
Dave Hickey gets it exactly right in his preface to this collection of journalism, poetry, fiction and memoir: Lewis, who died in 1997, was indeed 'the most stone wonderful writer that nobody ever heard of.' Writing for Rolling Stone in the early '70s, he almost singlehandedly invented the movie set piece, and no one's ever improved on his flint-eyed profiles of Sam Peckinpah and the Allman Brothers. But the best piece here is his searing memoir of his white-trash Texas parents, who died in what was ruled a double suicide. Etched in acid and heart's blood, it is a terse masterpiece.
Your gonzo journalism library isn't complete without him.
Jan Reid (1945–2020), like Grover Lewis, was a magazine writer, who wrote for Texas Monthly, GQ, Esquire, New York Times magazine, Men's Journal, and Slate. His books include The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, The Bullet Meant for Me, Let the People In, and Rio Grande.
W. K. "Kip" Stratton has written for Sports Illustrated, GQ, Outside, Southern magazine, Americana, and D: The Magazine of Dallas. His previous book is Backyard Brawl: Inside the Blood Feud between Texas and Texas A&M. Harcourt will publish his next book, Chasing the Rodeo, in 2005. He lives near Austin, Texas.
- Foreword by Dave Hickey: Magazine Writer
- Star-Crossed: A Biographical Sketch of Grover Lewis by Jan Reid and W. K. Stratton
- Part I. Movies
- Splendor in the Short Grass: The Making of The Last Picture Show
- Sam Peckinpah in Mexico: Over-Learning with El Jefe
- Up in Fat City: On the Set with Keach and Huston
- One Step over the Fucked-Up Line with Robert Mitchum
- Who's the Bull Goose Loony Here?
- Excerpt from The Code of the West (unfinished novel)
- Cowboy Movie in Black and White (poem)
- Old Movies in My Mind
- Part II. Music
- Dirge for a Bird
- The Hard Traveling of Woody Guthrie
- Lookin' for Lightnin'
- Hitting the Note with the Allman Brothers Band
- Stones Concert
- Part III. Loss
- The Wreckage Children (poem)
- Goodbye If You Call That Gone
- The Legacy of Huckleberry Finn
- Cracker Eden: Oak Cliff—a Report, a Memoir
- Hillbilly Song (poem)
- A Cracker's Farewell: A Remembrance by Robert Draper
- Thanks for the Use of the Hall (poem)
