"At the height of the sixties, a group of Texas writers stood apart from Texas' conservative establishment. Calling themselves the Mad Dogs, these six writers - Bud Shrake, Larry L. King, Billy Lee Brammer, Gary Cartwright, Dan Jekins, and Peter Gent - closely observed the effects of the Vietnam War; the Kennedy assassination; the rapid population shift from rural to urban environments; Lyndon Johnson's rise to national prominence; the Civil Rights movement; Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys; Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker, and the new outlaw music scene; the birth of a Texas film industry; Texas Monthly magazine; the flowering of "Texas Chic"; and Ann Richards' election as governor." "In Texas Literary Outlaws, Steven L. Davis makes extensive use of untapped literary archives to weave together a fascinating portrait of writers who came of age during a period of rapid social change. With Davis' eye for vibrant detail and a broad historical perspective, Texas Literary Outlaws moves easily between H. L. Hunt's Dallas mansion and the West Texas oil patch, from the New York literary salon of Elaine's to the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin, from Dennis Hopper on a film set in Mexico to Jerry Jeff Walker crashing a party at Princeton University. The Mad Dogs were less interested in Texas' mythic past than in the world they knew firsthand - a place of fast-growing cities and hard-edged political battles."--BOOK JACKET.