Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been reading, studying, and writing about Texas literature for over 25 years. I’m the longtime literary curator at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, which holds the archives of many leading writers from Texas and the Southwest. I have a personal passion for the 1960s and have written/co-written three nonfiction books set in the sixties.


I co-wrote

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon, and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD

By Bill Minutaglio, Steven L. Davis,

Book cover of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon, and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD

What is my book about?

The madcap real-life story of LSD guru Timothy Leary’s daring prison escape followed by a 28-month global manhunt as he…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Strange Peaches

Steven L. Davis Why did I love this book?

Bud Shrake’s novel of Dallas at the time of the Kennedy Assassination is an excellent example of what I call “eyewitness fiction.” As a prominent journalist at the rabidly anti-JFK Dallas Morning News, Shrake spent time mingling with the far-right millionaires who refashioned Dallas into a “City of Hate.” Yet the politically liberal, dope-smoking Shrake was also a denizen of Dallas’s underworld and was dating the star stripper at Jack Ruby’s nightclub. From these twin worlds, he fashioned this ferocious, comically subversive portrait of Dallas in the months leading up to the assassination.

Shrake’s writing has less in common with his Texas contemporaries than it does with American novelists Ken Kesey, Charles Portis, and Kurt Vonnegut. This novel blasts off so hard it can be a bit hard for some readers to hang on in the beginning. But if you stay with it, and latch on to Shrake’s Dexedrine-fueled prose, you’ll be in for a hell of a ride. Strange Peaches isn’t just a great Texas novel, it’s one of the best (though woefully underappreciated) American novels of the Sixties.

By Edwin Shrake,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Strange Peaches as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A TV western star quits his successful series and returns to Dallas to make a documentary film that reveals the truth about his home town. His quest forces him to learn if he is capable of using his six-gun for real as he moves from booze and radical politics in oil men's palaces into the infamous Carousel Club and the underworld of arms and dope smuggling in a city ripe for the murder of a President.


Book cover of All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

Steven L. Davis Why did I love this book?

Everybody knows about Larry McMurtry’s epic western, Lonesome Dove, but far fewer realize that McMurtry was at Stanford with Ken Kesey and Robert Stone in the early 1960s -- and he always had fascinating connections to the sixties counterculture.

All My Friends are Going to Be Strangers is one of McMurtry’s most endearing works: the portrait of a young, beat-influenced writer on an epic series of memorable road trips through Texas and the West. He’s exploring, observing, and questioning everything, including his own craft. The climactic scene, where McMurtry’s protagonist wades out into the Rio Grande to drown his manuscript, is one of the coolest endings in Texas lit.

By Larry McMurtry,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Hailed as one of "the best novels ever set in America's fourth largest city" (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry's "comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension" (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the "mundane happiness" of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, "El Chevy," bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable…


Book cover of The Yokota Officers Club

Steven L. Davis Why did I love this book?

I’m cheating a bit here because this book is set in the Japan and Okinawa, rather than Texas. But Sarah Bird is one of Texas’s most beloved writers, and this exquisite novel about the college-aged, Vietnam War-protesting daughter of an Air Force fighter pilot, is one of the finest novels written by anyone from Texas. Bird captures the mood of the Vietnam era with empathy and wonderful humor, but beyond that, The Yokota Officers Club is a deeply affecting story about families, about love, loss, and the hope of redemption. It’s a transcendent novel that feels both intimate and sweeping. Sarah Bird has written several fine books but this one is her masterpiece.

By Sarah Bird,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Yokota Officers Club as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“A GEM, POLISHED AND FACETED IN A WAY THAT PULLED ME INTO THE HEART OF IT WITH THE FIRST PARAGRAPH. . . . Important, touching, meaningful, and uplifting.”
–JEANNE RAY
Chicago Tribune

After a year away at college, military brat Bernadette Root has come “home” to Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, to spend the summer with her bizarre yet comforting clan. Ruled by a strict, regimented Air Force Major father, but grounded in their mother’s particular brand of humor, Bernie’s family was destined for military greatness during the glory days of the mid-’50s. But in Base life, where an…


Book cover of If White Kids Die: Memories of a Civil Rights Movement Volunteer

Steven L. Davis Why did I love this book?

Dick J. Reavis was a white teenager from Texas when he joined the Civil Rights movement in 1965. If White Kids Die is his clear-eyed, unsentimental memoir of his experiences in Alabama for the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee. It’s a fascinating, grassroots view from a foot soldier of the movement, someone far removed for the glamorous leadership positions.

Following his stint with SNCC, Reavis later joined SDS and became a prominent anti-war protester in Austin. During his time in the Movement, Reavis endured beatings, jailings, denunciations, and poverty. All of that, as it turned out, was good preparation for his eventual career: a life in journalism. He has since become a legendary journalist in Texas, famed for his tough and daring reporting. He once told me: “I knew Spanish, knew how to live poor, knew how to lie to bosses."

By Dick J. Reavis,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked If White Kids Die as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 1965 Dick J. Reavis, a white middle-class Texan, decided to join a voter registration programme, and spent a summer on the wrong side of the tracks in Demopolis, Alabama. This work describes his gradual maturation as he encountered the other side of legally-enforced racism.


Book cover of Journey to the West

Steven L. Davis Why did I love this book?

William Hauptman is a Tony Award-winning playwright and the author of one of my all-time favorite Texas novels, The Storm Season, about a tornado chaser in Wichita Falls during the Reagan era as the middle class is dissolving.

Journey to the West is a diamond-sharp autobiographical novel based on Hauptman’s experiences leaving his conservative hometown of Wichita Falls to go to college at the University of Texas in Austin. He arrives just as the sixties begin taking off, and soon his mind gets blown and his life upended. Hauptman writes so well of this quintessential experience that so many people have when they go to college and taste freedom for the first time in their lives. The novel/memoir follows our hero as he ends up in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, starving and strung out. Hauptman, is a first-class writer and this is one of his coolest books.

By William Hauptman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Journey to the West as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

It is the 1960s, and Will Langner is a high school thespian who cannot wait to get out of his Texas town and attend college in Austin, where he will never have to see any of his peers again. But Will has no idea his path is about to lead him to a fellow classmate with the power to change everything?even the future.

Danny Abrams swears there is something better than popularity in high school: Zen enlightenment. As the two search for the meaning of life, they finally graduate and embark on a journey that takes them westward from Austin…


Explore my book 😀

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon, and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD

By Bill Minutaglio, Steven L. Davis,

Book cover of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon, and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD

What is my book about?

The madcap real-life story of LSD guru Timothy Leary’s daring prison escape followed by a 28-month global manhunt as he was pursued by an increasingly desperate President Nixon and his henchmen. The book winds its way among the homegrown revolutionaries of the Weather Underground, a Black Panther outpost in socialist Algeria, hash-smuggling hippies from the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and secret agents on four continents. Deeply researched from freshly uncovered primary sources and new firsthand interviews, The Most Dangerous Man in America reads like a gonzo, drug-addled modern American thriller.

Book cover of Strange Peaches
Book cover of All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
Book cover of The Yokota Officers Club

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Sor Juana, My Beloved

By MaryAnn Shank,

Book cover of Sor Juana, My Beloved

MaryAnn Shank Author Of Sor Juana, My Beloved

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.

MaryAnn's book list on the mystical Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

What is my book about?

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.

Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…

Sor Juana, My Beloved

By MaryAnn Shank,

What is this book about?

This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.

One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…


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Interested in the 1960s counterculture, Texas, and Japan?

Texas 224 books
Japan 516 books