Tom's Two Cents : Elmer Kelton's "The Good Old Boys"

It hardly seems coincidental that Texas writer Elmer Kelton's "The Good Old Boys," first published in 1978, was re-issued by TCU Press in a special edition in 1985, the year of first publication of Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize winning "Lonesome Dove."  Both novels are by Texas writers, Kelton older by ten years than McMurtry, both born and raised in West Texas in the late 19th-early 20th century ranching tradition.  "The Good Old Boys" in its main character, Hewey Calloway, has a kind of Gus McRae prototype, a freedom-loving man of the range, who refuses to be hemmed in by the fences of modern life.

Unlike McMurtry's Gus, Hewey has a family of sorts--a younger brother, two young nephews, and a sharp tongued sister-in-law, Eve, who forces Hewey to face up to the kind of dead-end life he's living.  Then of course there's the single and pretty schoolteacher, Spring Renfro, who loves Hewey for who he is, but at the same time would like him to become someone he isn't.

This is, like "Lonesome Dove," the story of the passing of an era, and the loss not only of a time and place in the history of Texas and the West, but of the old-time, free-wheeling cowboy/cowhand, who did the work he did admirably but in the end was responsible to no one but himself.  It's about freedom at a price.

Kelton is a fine writer, one of the best Texas has produced, and "The Good Old Boys" is one of his best.  Go to San Angelo, Texas, where he spent the last decades of his life,(he was born and raised in Crane) and you will see a statue of him outside the Library, one of the few tributes of its sort that Texas has raised to its literary fathers.