John Henry Faulk: The Making of a Liberated Mind.

• Author: Rocawich, Linda
• Position: Brief Article

I'm recommending this next book with reservations. John Henry Faulk was a presence not to be ignored in Texas during the ten years I lived there (1970-1980), sittin's up in Madisonville plotting against the strip miners, flyin' off to Nashville every so often to tape a few months' worth of Hee-Haw, comin' down to Austin and waxing enthusiastic about something or other on the second-story front porch of The Texas Observer and the Texas Civil Liberties Union.

This biography by Michael C. Burton, John Henry Faulk: The Making of a Liberated Mind (Eakin Press), doesn't cover those years. It covers his childhood in Austin, on through the years of his blacklisting and the...