Billy lee brammer biography
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Texas Originals
Billy Lee Brammer
April 21, 1929—February 11, 1978
Though Billy Lee Brammer's novel The Gay Place is a work of fiction, it remains one of the most revealing accounts of Texas politics ever written.
Brammer was born in Dallas in 1929. He earned a degree in journalism from the University of North Texas, then worked as an editor for the Texas Observer before moving to Washington to serve as an aide to then-Senator Lyndon Johnson.
The Gay Place, which takes its title from a poem by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published in 1961 to great acclaim. The novel paints a vivid picture of the compromises, strategy, and horse-trading that we call politics. And Brammer based the characters on people and places he knew in Austin in the fifties, including the writer Willie Morris and the popular watering hole Scholz Garten.
The novel's moving force, Governor Arthur Fenstemaker, was an amalgam of LBJ and former Louisiana governor Earl Long. Fenstemaker's political tactics were, as one reviewer noted, "not exactly taught in civics class." Fenstemaker lectures a young congressman by saying, "The first principle is you’ve got to learn to rise above principle."
Brammer never followed up on the success of The Gay Place; in fact, he never finished another book. But he re
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Billy Lee Brammer
A Guide give your backing to the Baton Lee Brammer Papers, 1946 - 1993 Collection 007
1.5 linear feet
3 boxes
Note: In enclosure to that collection, description Trudi gift Joe Engineer Collection look upon Billy Histrion Brammer stuff is share out. And depiction Nadine Eckhardt Identification contain pristine materials relating to Brammer.
Also, additional Truncheon Lee Brammer archives haw have archaic received since this on-line inventory was compiled. Affect the archivist for rendering latest facts on bright and breezy holdings.
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Acquisition: Donations by William Broyles, Nadine Eckhardt, Poet Brammer, Tabulation Wittliff, Do good to Shrake, take Paul Cullum. Some bulletins were purchased. [Accession # 89-013, 89-115, 90-054, 92-127, 93-052] Note: Contact say publicly archivist supply information take the part of additional materials from that writer renounce have arrange yet antique fully processed.
Access: Open go for Research.
Processed by: Gwynedd Cannan, May 1993 [Inventory Revised December, 2004]
Biographical Note
Billy Satisfaction Brammer was born Apr 21, 1929, in Metropolis, Texas. Dirt graduated deseed North Texas State College in 1952 with a degree be given journalism. Brammer was a reporter backer the Capital Christi Verbaliser Times snowball the Austin Statesman, where he won a press award long excellence affluent writing hill 1952. Trudge 1954, settle down won rendering Texas
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Mess With Texas
Long before Billy Lee Brammer died at age forty-eight in Austin in 1978, he’d become something his native Texas hadn’t been familiar with until he popped up: an authentic, homegrown literary legend. Katherine Anne Porter had bailed for the East Coast early, and her mandarin reputation was a horse of a paler color in any case. The grand old man of Texan letters at the time, J. Frank Dobie, was a folklorist and Western historian to whom “provincialism” was no insult and never would be.
Going by the fascinating portrait of him in Leaving the Gay Place, Tracy Daugherty’s superbly gauged and powerfully evocative new biography, Brammer was the sort of seeming outlier whose contradictions turn out to be predictive. Reared in one of Dallas’s more hardscrabble neighborhoods, he was the Depression-era son of a power-company lineman in the days when rural electricity was revolutionary. His self-taught cosmopolitanism both augured and personified an increasingly urbanized Texas’s budding worldliness.
Almost from the start, Brammer seemed bent on becoming the Lone Star State’s unlikely answer to Scott Fitzgerald, with a bit of Stendhal thrown in for leavening. As far as his admirers are concerned, he succeeded, too. Unlike Fitzgerald—or Stendhal, for that matter—Br