![]() “It’s her story, but a good one, and I see no reason to change it,” Fehrenbach said in a 1964 letter to PAW. ![]() His mother, Mardel Wentz Fehrenbach, believed her son’s destiny as a writer and historian was set at age 10, when he completed Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. As a boy, he read the classics in his grandfather’s library. ![]() But the story of “Texas, as Texas” continues, thanks in part to the enduring popularity of Fehrenbach’s book and the author’s later work as chairman of the Texas Historical Commission.īorn in San Benito, Texas, on the southernmost stretch of the Rio Grande, Fehrenbach came from a family line that included cotton growers and cattlemen. The population of Texas has more than doubled since the publication of Lone Star in 1968, with much of that growth coming in the office-working, car-driving metropolises of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin. “hen the office-working, car-driving Texan is completely indistinguishable from his Northern counterpart,” he wrote, “the history of Texas, as Texas, will be done.” But near the end of the final chapter, Fehrenbach foresaw an end to the Texas heritage he held dear. ![]() Fehrenbach ’45’s best-known book, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans, lays out a 719-page argument for the state’s distinctiveness, from the land itself to the enduring frontier values of its people. ![]()
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