Dorothy Scarborough is an author whose story intrigues me. She was the youngest child of Mary Adelaide
(Ellison) and John Bledsoe Scarborough, a Confederate veteran from Louisiana
and successful Texas lawyer. Dorothy was born on January 27, 1878, in Mount Carmel,
a small Smith County community near Tyler, Texas. Her brother, George Moore
Scarborough graduated from the University of Texas law school in 1897 and went on to become a successful playwright. Her sister, Martha Douglass (Mrs.
George McDaniel), had degrees from Vassar and Baylor and eventually published
three books.
The family moved to Sweetwater, in West Texas, in 1882
because Mrs. Scarborough needed the dry climate for her health. They left
Sweetwater in 1887 and Mary and Judge John Scarborough moved their family to
Waco into a Victorian mansion near the campus so that the children could have a
good education at Baylor.
By no means comparable since my father was not a Judge, my parents moved to Lubbock
so that my brother and I could attend good schools and later attend Texas Tech.
Hero’s parents did the same to provide access to good education for him and his siblings.
Dorothy had always been encouraged in her studies by her
parents. Writing became her passion along with a career in teaching. Judge
Scarborough became a member of the Baylor University board of trustees in 1888
and served until his death in 1905. Dorothy made her home in Waco until she
moved permanently to New York City, where in 1916 she began to teach at
Columbia University.
Scarborough received her B.A. from Baylor in 1896 and her
M.A. in 1899.
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| Dorothy Scarborough, photo from Baylor University |
She pursued further graduate work in literature at the University
of Chicago in the summers from 1906 to 1910. She spent the 1910–11 school year
in residence at Oxford University in England, even though women could not be
awarded degrees there at that time. She went on for the doctorate in literature
at Columbia University and received the degree in 1917. She was hired
immediately to teach creative writing in the extension division of Columbia. In
1923 Baylor University awarded her an honorary doctor of literature degree.
While completing her master's degree she taught English at
Baylor and also taught briefly in the public schools of Marlin, Texas. As a
regular faculty member at Baylor from 1905 to 1915, she taught general
literature courses, composition, creative writing, and journalism. She also
taught a popular and influential college-men's Sunday school class at the First
Baptist Church in Waco. Her progress at Columbia was marked by her promotion to
lecturer in 1919, to assistant professor in 1923, and to associate professor in
1931. Her teaching emphasis was creative writing, especially the techniques of
the short story and novel.
The study of folklore in Texas was in infancy when
Scarborough was teaching at Baylor. She was an early member of the Texas
Folklore Society, which was founded in 1910, and served as president of the
society in 1914–15. She called herself a "song catcher." She believed
radio threatened the survival of folk songs, and she traveled around the
Appalachian Mountains recording centuries-old ballads with a hand-powered
Dictaphone. Scarborough believed these folk songs told stories about a
community's values and its collective history. Dorothy Scarborough took
inspiration from America's regional cultures and, in doing so, preserved the
creative expressions of ordinary people from times past. Don't you wish we could listen to those Dictaphone melodies?
As reflected in her publications, her interests as a
folklorist were generally in folksongs, cowboys, and the lore of the Negro. In
addition to various essays and articles, she published two major folklore
collections, ON THE TRAIL OF NEGRO FOLKSONGS and A SONG CATCHER IN THE SOUTHERN
MOUNTAINS (published posthumously in 1937).
Dorothy Scarborough was a novelist whose works dealt
primarily with the plight and role of women in Texas and elsewhere, although
she also had an interest in ghosts, sharecroppers, cowboys, and other local
characters and settings. Her first book was a collection of her own poetry, FUGITIVE
VERSES in 1912. She also published poetry in various magazines and journals at
Baylor and elsewhere.
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| Mexican Family 1910 near Sweetwater, Texas |
IN THE LAND OF COTTON, CAN’T GET A REDBIRD, and THE
STRETCH-BERRY SMILE examine the crushing responsibilities of cotton farming on
the children of tenant farmers and sharecroppers. These novels, plus her
juvenile reader, THE STORY OF COTTON, vividly depict all aspects of cotton
farming, from planting to chopping to picking and finally to ginning and
selling.
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| Cotton in the field ready for harvesting |
I suppose another of the reasons Dorothy Scarborough appeals
to me is that for most of his life my father was in the cotton business, first
as manager of a cotton gin and later as a cotton buyer. He often talked of the poor
treatment of migrants and said that the only thing a dry-land farmer raised in
West Texas was dirt—not technically true but often the case. In addition, Ms
Scarborough is a writer as I am and we both also worked as journalists—although
she had a far better education than I have and a more respected journalistic
career.
Ms Scarborough's books include FROM A SOUTHERN PORCH, IMPATIENT
GRISELDA, THE SUPERNATURAL IN MODERN ENGLISH FICTION (her dissertation thesis),
THE UNFAIR SEX (serialized, 1925–26), and THE WIND. This last, controversial
novel, has assured her reputation as an American regional novelist.
THE WIND created a furor in Texas when it was published
because of its negative portrayal of frontier living conditions on the cattle
ranges around Sweetwater in the 1880s. The book was also published anonymously
as a publicity ploy. Reviewers praised the book for depicting the West with
"cold truth." However, many Texas readers attacked THE WIND—and
argued that only a Yankee could have written it.
According to Gene Fowler, “few Texas books have generated
such controversy as Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 novel, THE WIND. Set amid the
sandstorms around Sweetwater during the drought of 1886-87, the book described
the West Texas winds as "the enemies of women," a "resistless
force" that "wailed to [Letty, the main character] across waste
places in the night, calling to her like a demon lover." R.C. Crane, a
Sweetwater lawyer and president of the West Texas Historical Association, spoke
for many West Texans when he blasted the novel’s author (the first edition was
published anonymously) for what he saw as inaccuracies in local color, geography,
and cowboy talk. The book, Crane declared, even slandered the prairie dog. Other,
enthusiastic critics called the book a masterpiece and likened Scarborough’s
treatment of nature to that of Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad.”
Many critics regard this novel as a Texas classic, notable
for its characterization of a tragic heroine driven to murder and insanity.
Finally, the Sweetwater Chamber of Commerce invited Dorothy
to visit, thinking its members could point out the many good aspects of their
community. Ms Scarborough accepted the invitation, but must have felt
vindicated when a West Texas “blue norther” storm blew in and proved her point.
Winning her audience with humor and charm, she quoted a letter her mother had
written after the family’s move to Waco. Complaining of Central Texas’ heat and
dryness one summer, Mrs. Scarborough had exclaimed, "Oh, how I long for a
Sweetwater breeze!"
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| Participants in Sweetwater's spring Rattlesnake Roundup Sweetwater is a nice town in spite of the above (shudder) |
THE WIND was made into a movie in 1927 starring Lillian Gish
and Lars Hansen. That movie is probably the last great silent film, even though
the producers changed—as movies are apt to—the ending to a happy one unrelated
to the ending of the novel. By the way, Lillian Gish was producer of the movie
and must have been one of the first actresses to produce a movie. She arranged
for the story rights.
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| Movie poster |
According to Ms Gish, “The film was shot near Bakersfield, California (where I lived for six years as a child) at the edge of the
Mojave Desert where temperatures rose to 120 degrees in the middle of the day,”
she said in an interview. “Eight airplane propellers were employed to stir up
all the sand. There was so much swirling sand that everyone on the set wore
black grease paint around the eyes and big goggles and scarves around the face
as much as possible. The sand was so stinging and hot that it burned holes in
my clothes.” Ms Gish tells of the day when she went to her dressing room
trailer and unwittingly clasped the burning hot metal doorknob. It took the
skin off her right-hand palm.
As Ms Gish related, the exhibitors liked the movie, but
wouldn’t accept the ending. They knew that their audiences wouldn’t tolerate a
tragic ending, so the crew was forced to shoot another scene, which ends with a
happily ever after. Ms Gish said in the interview, “We all thought it was
morally unjust to force us to change an artwork.”
Ms Scarborough’s story line of THE WIND is fairly simple.
Traveling by train from civilized Virginia, the refined young heroine Lettie
Mason is puzzled and disoriented by the sandstorms the train encounters as they
reach West Texas. She is to live with a relative and his family.
To her horror, she discovers that the wind is never-ending —
a driving, tormenting beast. Involved with two men who want her, she fights for
her sanity. In the final scene, she runs out into the sandstorm and is
swallowed up and lost.
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| Sandstorm rolling into at Midland, Texas, 1910 You can understand how someone could run into this storm and get lost. |
Ms Scarborough also edited three books, FAMOUS MODERN GHOST
STORIES, HUMOROUS GHOST STORIES, and SELECTED SHORT STORIES OF TODAY. Her
other literary productions include short stories, book reviews (she was on the
literary staff of the New York Sun),
critical essays, and articles dealing primarily with folklore and other
literary topics. She also serialized “The Woman’s Viewpoint” in a magazine, in
which she denounced the inequities under which women lived and worked at that
time.
Though she lived the last two decades of her life in the
northeast, she vowed, "I’ll match my loyalty against that of anybody in
the State." As for Texas as a subject for literature, she wrote that
"her native sons and daughters would be foolish to look elsewhere for
literary inspiration."
Dorothy Scarborough died on November 7, 1935, at her home in
New York City and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Waco, Texas.
Sources:
Most of my books are set in Texas and two of them include
sandstorms. The first is the historical THE MOST UNSUITABLE COURTSHIP in which
a sandstorm plays a large part.
The other is the contemporary , which takes place in West Texas, HOME SWEET TEXAS
HOME.
