Confessions of a Maddog: A Romp Through the High-Flying Texas Music and Literary Era of the Fifties to the Seventies - Hardcover

Jay Dunston Milner (author)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1574410504 ISBN 13: 9781574410501

Publisher: University of North Texas Press, 1998

Synopsis

Jay Milner was part of a generation of Texas writers whose heyday lasted from the late 1950s through the 1970s. The group was comprised of Billie Lee Brammer, Edwin "Bud" Shrake, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, Larry L. King, Pete Gent, and (peripherally) Larry McMurtry and Willie Morris. From the musical scene there were "picker poets," as Milner calls them, such as Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, and Waylon Jennings. Some of the primary works coming from this generation of writers include Brammer's The Gay Place, Shrake's Strange Peaches, Cartwrights's Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter, Kings's The Whorehouse Papers and None But a Blockhead, Jan Reid's The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, and Willie Nelson's album Phases and Stages.

About this title

About the Author

Jay Dunston Milner attended high school in Lubbock where he played on a state championship football team. He graduated from Southern Mississippi University with a B.A. and M.A. and coached football before becoming a reporter for the Hattiesburg, Mississippi American and the Associated Press. He was managing editor of Hodding Carter's Greenville, Mississippi Delta Democrat-Times and went to New York as assistant to the editorial page editor of the New York Herald Tribune. He returned to Texas in 1961 and fell in with a rowdy crowd of Texas prose and song writers to whom much of this book is devoted. He lives in Fort Worth.

From the Back Cover

Once upon a time there was an innocent lad from West Texas who wrote a novel and fell in with a rabble of Texas writers as they were bridging the literary gap between J. Frank Dobie and his paisanos and the current bumper crop of Texas writers who seem to be everywhere writing about everything. This rowdy rabble of gap bridgers bonded in a sort of literary and social club they called Maddog Inc. (Motto: Doing indefinable services to mankind.) But our hero managed to live through it all anyway. This is his story.

Jay Milner was part of a generation of Texas writers whose heyday lasted from the late 1950s through the 1970s. The group comprised Billie Lee Brammer, Edwin "Bud" Shrake, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jenkins, Larry L. King, Pete Gent, and (peripherally) Larry McMurtry and Willie Morris, among others.

From the musical scene there were the "picker poets" such as Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Billy Joe Shaver, and Waylon Jennings.

Some of the primary works coming from this generation of writers include Brammer's The Gay Place, Shrake's Strange Peaches, Cartwright's Confessions of a Washed-up Sportswriter, King's The Whorehouse Papers and None But a Blockhead, Jan Reid's The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, and Willie Nelson's album Phases and Stages.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of North Texas Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1574410504
• ISBN 13: 9781574410501
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304