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During the first half of the twentieth century J. Frank Dobie collected and shared with American and British readers stories of the Texas brush country and northern Mexico. A writer, lecturer, humorist, raconteur, and goodwill ambassador for the American Southwest, Dobie was raised as a working cowboy in the countryside south of San Antonio, Texas, and spent most of his life fighting the mythic views of the West perpetuated by such authors as Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour. Like those authors, Dobie rode a national wave of nostalgia for the vanishing freedoms of the West that was expressed in pulp fiction, movies, and television shows from the 1930s to the 1950s. His writings are, as Larry McMurtry has argued, "prudish and expurgated"; his style, to modern eyes, is flowery and romantic; his few female characters are awkward pasteboard cutouts; and his West is a land of bountiful goodness. His entertaining tales provide fascinating anecdotes and detailed natural histories of southern Texas and northern Mexico, and his many books and articles earned him the sobriquet "Mr.
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