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Copyright 1998, John W. Wilson First published by the Macmillan Company, 1948.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilson, John W. (John Walter), 1920 High John the conqueror / by John W. Wilson, with an after word by James Ward Lee. p. cm. ISBN 0-87565-186-0 (alk. paper) I. Title. PS3545.I6349H51998 813'.54dc21 98-4911 CIP
Cover illustration and design by Barbara Whitehead, Austin, Texas
Page v
For FRANCES
Page vii
Introduction
In 1984, a good thirty-six years after The Macmillan Company published High John the Conqueror, Don Graham of the University of Texas at Austin requested my permission to quote a passage from the novel in a book to be titled Texas: A Literary Portrait, on which he was working. Pleased and a little astonished, I agreed. I was pleased that after thirty-six years there was anybody at all who remembered there had ever been such novel, and astonished to learn that it was a work being brought to the attention of students in a famous college course on life and literature of the Southwest. Later, I was equally pleased to find that Graham's book, published in 1985, referred to High John as "The breakthrough novel on cotton culture...."
In 1986, I got another pleasant surprise and ego-boost when James Ward Lee, then director of the Center for Texas Studies at North Texas State University, included a review of High John in the "Classics of Texas Fiction" series he was doing as a Texas sesquicentennial project and in his book of the same name published in the following year.
Page viii
High John a classic? That had a nice ring to it, and here I was still alive to hear it! "Is it possible," I was forced to wonder, "is it just barely possible that this book, so long ago put up and hidden away on the back shelves of my mind, still has something to say?"
If so, it says it of life in a time and a place that no longer exist outside the covers of the book; and if this piece of writing, imperfect in craftsmanship as it may be, sensitizes a reader today to even a little of that life and evokes even a small measure of empathy with the people who lived it, then its re-issue takes on meaning and adds a marvel: Read the story and fly back in time to a pre-Civil Rights world during the Great Depression.
You've got to think 1940 (if you're old enough) to realize the frame of reference, In that year Allen Maxwell, editor of the Southwest Review at Southern Methodist University, gave the book a beginning impetus toward publication when he accepted and published "Us Goin' to Town," a short story that later was incorporated in the novel. High John had pretty well taken shape in my mind by the time that short story was written, but it had to wait out the interruption of World War II for the threads to be picked up, the scenes recollected and the writing completed.
They say you write best about what you know best. I had not consciously set out to write a book about the "cotton culture," but having grown up in it, I certainly knew mule-powered farming and the people who worked at it. Nor had I set out in High John to write a sociological novel, but that's the way a good many reviewers saw it when the book was first published.
Robert Halsband in The Saturday Review of Literature: "High John... represents the ruthless economic forces that are conquering the farm lands. The Websters, like their
Page ix
counterparts the Joads, are being driven off the land to make way for progress...."
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1998