Giant country

by Don Graham

Over pina coladas the author works on his tan and discusses timeless Texas themes: the transition of the state from a rural to an urban world, the sense of a vanishing era, and the way that artists in literature and film represent a state both infectiously grand and too big for its britches. In "Fildelphia Story," Graham remembers his Ivy League professorial stint in a city the small-town Texan who rented him a moving van looked up under "F." In "Doing England" the Lone Star Yankee courts Oxford University and returns with a veddy British education. In "The Ground Sense Necessary" a native son journeys inward to explore the dry ceremonies of frontier Protestantism and to recount movingly his father's funeral in Collin County. With his wide-ranging knowledge of classic regional works, Graham unerringly traces the style and substance of local literary giants and offers a sometimes irreverent but always entertaining look at the Texas triumvirate of Dobie, Webb and Bedichek. Other essays l