Garden and Gun magazine editor in chief David DiBenedetto tweeted today that he had just read the book again and had been 'marveling at its brilliance. But it was his first book, his memoir, that remains his most enduring. A living bond has flowed between Texas writers and rivers ever since the 1960 publication of John Gravess classic journey along the Brazos, Goodbye to a. The most recent book from Graves was 2007's My Dogs and Guns, a collection of short stories. first of four days of a central Texas blue norther, a weather phenomenon that some Texans call a frog-strangler. His canoe trip ended near Glen Rose, in the area southwest of Fort Worth where he would eventually settle and where he reportedly died this week. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream's regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Headed down the river, Graves took along a dachshund, some supplies, and a wealth of personal and historic knowledge that he shared with his readers. In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. The book had a deceptively simple premise: In the late 1950s, Graves took a canoe ride down miles and miles of the Brazos River in north-central Texas, where a plan to build dams, and irrevocably alter the terrain, was being put in place.

His 1960 memoir Goodbye to a River, which recounted his tracing of a doomed waterway he knew in his youth, 'was quickly recognized as a classic,' as NPR member station KERA reports. YouTubeĪuthor John Graves, whose books became icons of rural life in Texas, has died at 92, according to multiple reports.

KERA's Art and Seek visits author John Graves at his Hill Country home, a place called Hard Scrabble.

John graves goodbye to a river