Texas Originals

Raised in Houston, Mickey Leland was committed to providing jobs for minorities and health care for the poor. After winning Barbara Jordan's seat in the U.S. Congress in 1978, he fought tirelessly to end global starvation.

The quiet cotton farming community of Wharton, Texas, is the touchstone for the career of playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote. He wrote plays about everyday people living in small Texas towns like his boyhood home, and his work was praised for its authenticity. "I believe very deeply in the human spirit," he once said. "I've known people that the world has thrown everything at. . . . And yet something about them retains a dignity. They face life and they don't ask quarters."

Writer and editor Willie Morris was born in Mississippi and made his name in New York, but he left an indelible mark on Texas journalism. Morris served as editor of the Daily Texan and the Texas Observer during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. "Texas was where I reached maturity," he later recalled. Writing about "politics, the ambivalent and exposed world of the politician . . . taught me about the complexity of human affairs, about the irrelevancy of most dogmatic formulas, about loyalty and courage and devotion to human causes."

Writer Mary Austin Holley introduced English-speaking readers of the 1830s and '40s to Texas, which she called a land of "surpassing beauty . . . a splendid country." Sadly, she died of yellow fever in 1846 and never settled in the place that had captured her heart, but her work provides invaluable accounts of life in early Texas.

According to one of his fans, actor and Texas native Zachary Scott had an air of sophistication that made him look like he had "been born in a dinner jacket." Best known for portraying scoundrels, playboys, and villains, Scott was one of Texas's most recognizable faces during Hollywood's golden age.

Scholar and folklorist John Mason Brewer was born in Goliad in 1896. Over his fifty-year career, Brewer almost single-handedly preserved the African American folklore of his home state. His books serve as a timeless record of Texas storytelling, and powerful proof of what he called "folklore as a living force."

Historian Carlos E. Castañeda changed how we think of the Southwest. Through exhaustive and groundbreaking research, he told the story of the Texas-Mexico borderlands as one of shared culture and heritage, rather than conflict and division.

Born about 1845, Comanche leader Quanah Parker lived two vastly different lives: the first as a warrior among the Plains Indians of Texas, and the second as a pragmatic leader who sought a place for his people in a rapidly changing America.

A master of color, shading, and detail, Texas painter Frank Reaugh recorded what he called "the broad opalescent prairies" as he saw them more than a century ago. His most famous works feature the Texas longhorn in its natural habitat, the Texas plains.

Born in Galveston in 1894, King Vidor grew up with the movies. Over the course of his career, he directed both silent and sound films and worked with many of Hollywood's top stars, from Charlie Chaplin to Audrey Hepburn.