Philip McBride

Author Philip McBride is an avid reader of military historical fiction and is a compulsive writer. He lives with his wife Juanita in Lockhart, Texas, a small town which is the acknowledged Barbeque Capital of Texas, and not far from the Alamo.

McBride is a researcher who values the work of historians who have chronicled the great battles of the Civil War. As importantly, he relies on primary source diaries and memoirs of real Civil War soldiers to capture their views of soldiering in the 1860’s, and to learn how the common soldiers spent their days while campaigning.

Besides writing, McBride is active in making life in Lockhart a little better for everyone through his involvement in church, Kiwanis, the local historical society, the Texas Ramp Foundation, and the outfit that really lives up to its motto, “Doing the Most Good”--the Salvation Army.

In his first book of the 1800's outside the Civil War, in 2017, McBride completed a novel about the early Texas Rangers. A Different Country Entirely brings to life the Callahan Expedition of 1855 during which 115 Texas Rangers ventured into Mexico resulting in a bloody clash with the Mexican army.

McBride is also co-author of Texans at Antietam, a work of nonfiction highlighting the mostly-long-forgotten personal accounts of the men of Hood's Texas Brigade who fought at Antietam.

In 2018, McBride shifted to writing about Texas' Great Comanche Raid of 1840, but in a fanciful way--through the involvement of a mutant giant flying horny toad dragon. A Different Dragon Entirely is a girl-meets-dragon bromance tale wrapped around some good Texas history. It's admittedly an odd pairing, but the tale works.

With Might & Main, completed in 2019, brings the Civil War to McBride's hometown of Lockhart, Texas as he writes of the war in Louisiana where Lockhart's sons fought in the campaigns of 1863 and '64.

In 2020, during the isolation of COVID, McBride finished his moral-driven novel written especially for his five grandchildren. Birdbrain is an autobiographical, with a few fictitious additions, narrative by 13 year-old-year Danny about his awakening to the ways of the world in grades four through seven.

Published as his life is opening back up after his COVID vaccinations, McBride drew on his experiences as a high school principal when writing Just To Be Fair, his story of a school shooter and a teenage romance, sort of a 1985 Redneck Romeo and Juliet.

Author McBride is also an active blogger, having recently published his 168th blog post. His posts often connect unexpected dots, illustrating how the life we live today is still intertwined with how folks lived in the 1800's. His blog, McBride's Civil War Novels, can be accessed on BlogSpot.com.