Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures)
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Authors: John Graves
JOHN GRAVES
John Graves was born in Texas and educated at Rice and Columbia universities. He has published a number of books, chiefly nonfiction concerned with his home region. He lives with his wife on some four hundred acres of rough Texas hill country, which he described in his book
Hard Scrabble
.
ALSO BY JOHN GRAVES
The Water Hustlers
(with T.H. Watkins and Robert Boyle)
Hard Scrabble
The Last Running
From a Limestone Ledge
Blue and Some Other Dogs
Self-Portrait, with Birds
A John Graves Reader
John Graves and the Making of
Goodbye to a River
FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, JULY 2002
Copyright ©
1959
by The Curtis Publishing Company
Copyright ©
1960,
copyright renewed
1988
by John Graves
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1960.
Certain passages in this book first appeared in
Holiday
in somewhat different form.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Graves, John, 1920-
Goodbye to a river, a narrative / John Graves. — [ist ed.]
p. cm.
Brazos River (Tex.) 2. Brazos River Valley (Tex.) I. Title.
F392.B842 G
7
917.641 60-10954
eISBN: 978-0-307-77335-7
v3.1
for
H.,
who came along at about the same time
.
I hope the world she will know
will still have a few rivers and
other quiet things in it
.
A NOTE
T
HOUGH
this is not a book of fiction, it has some fictionalizing in it. Its facts are factual and the things it says happened did happen. But I have not scrupled to dramatize historical matter and thereby to shape its emphases as I see them, or occasionally to change living names and transpose existing places and garble contemporary incidents. Some of the characters, including at times the one I call myself, are composite. People are people, and if you put some of them down the way they are, they likely wouldn’t be happy. I don’t blame them. Nevertheless, even those parts are true in a fictional sense. As true as I could make them.
PART ONE
