Robert Flynn
Robert Flynn was born at home on a square mile of Wilbarger County, Texas, thirteen years after the Red River War, when Chief Quanah Parker and his Comanche tribe were threatened with genocide. He began his education at Midway, a two-room school midway between Chillicothe and Odell, Texas.
He continued his education by traveling, reading, and writing. He received two Wrangler Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and two Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. He is a past President of the Texas Institute of Letters and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from that organization. His adaptation of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying to the stage received a Special Jury Award at the Theater of Nations in Paris, 1964. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis Who's Who. He is a professor emeritus at Trinity University in San Antonio.
His novels include Jade: Outlaw and Jade: The Law (both published by JoSara Media); North to Yesterday; In the House of the Lord; The Sounds of Rescue, The Signs of Hope; Wanderer Springs; The Last Klick; The Devil's Tiger, co-authored with the late Dan Klepper; Tie-Fast Country; and Echoes of Glory. He is also the author of a two-part documentary, "A Cowboy Legacy," broadcast on ABC-TV, and A Personal War in Vietnam, a nonfiction oral history. Robert served in Vietnam and has traveled the world, often with his grandson Colin.
Novels
In this sequel to Jade: Outlaw, Jade, a rough man of the old West, molded by a tragic past, has fallen for Rain, a woman raised by Indians, a symbol of all that he hates and all that he is. Now these two outcasts, struggling to build their own relationship, face a West that is changing. As Jade becomes the Law, he must deal with “progress”: greedy cattle barons, religious righteousness, political aspirations, railroads, Civil War remnants, prejudice and outlaws.
Is doing the right thing the right thing to do? Riley O’Connor did what he was taught was right. When he told his story his listeners agreed he had done the right thing. But Riley was not convinced and became Jade, a feared and respected outlaw. Then he met a woman who could prove he did the right thing but she did what everyone knew was the wrong thing and refused to confess it.
A fictitious Texas county that embraces its legends, but not its actual history is threatened when a Sheriff is challenged in an election by a local hero , and a drama professor announces that he will write a play depicting the true story of Second Platoon, which many fear will expose the dark underside of Mills County.
Echoes of Glory, has won the Western Writers of America 2010 Spur Award in the Western Long Novel category. Since 1953 the WWA Spur Awards have honored the best in Western fiction, non-fiction, and film scripting. Flynn is now on the list of the most distinguished Western writers of the last half-century.
Sherrill O'Connor can't seem to fit in and has difficulty coping with the adversities of life, but suddenly faces the greatest test and finds himself a changed man. This book addresses the complex subjects of death, war, media manipulation, and the concept of celebrity.
An Interview with Bob Flynn
I was born at home in a house surrounded by cotton fields. A few miles to the east and we would would have been in an oil field. A few miles west and we would have been on land good for nothing but running cows and chasing jackrabbits. My grandfather had been tricked into buying the only place in twenty miles that would grow cotton.
It was in the cotton field that I first learned the power of the English language. Those who chopped cotton with a hoe were not called hoers. As my mother explained to me with a switch. It occurred to me that if the wrong word like hoer had the power to move my mother to such action, just think what using the right word like hoe hand could accomplish.
That was when I first got the notion of being a writer. I knew it wasn't going to be easy. We didn't go in much for writing at the country school I attended. We studied penmanship. But we knew what a writer was. A writer was somebody who was dead. And if he was any good he had been dead a long time. If he was real good, people killed him. They killed him with hemlock. Hemlock was the Greek word for Freshman Composition.
The country school I attended was closed, and we were bused to Chillicothe. Chillicothe, Texas is small. Chillicothe is so small there's only one Baptist Church. Chillicothe is so small you have to go to Quanah to have a coincidence. For a good coincidence, you have to go to Vernon. Chillicothe was fairly bursting with truth and beauty, and my teacher encouraged me to write something that had an epiphany. For an epiphany, you had to go all the way to Wichita Falls.
Real writers wrote about such things as I had never heard of.Damsels. Splendor falling on castle walls. For splendor, we had to go to the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show. Since I wasn't overly familiar with damsels and splendor, I tried reading what real writers wrote about rural life. "Dear child of nature, let them rail. There is a nest in a green vale." Which was pretty mystifying to me. Didn't writers get chiggers like everybody else?
It looked like for truth and beauty you had to cross Red River. All I knew about was a little place called Chillicothe. And it wasn't even the Chillicothe that was on the map. Truth in that mythical place was neither comic nor tragic, neither big nor eternal. And it was revealed through the lives of common folk who belched and fornicated, and knew moments of courage, and saw beauty in their meager lives. But I could not write about the people I knew without using the vocabulary they knew. My father did not believe a cowboy said "golly bum" when a horse ran him through a bob wire fence.
Words are not casual things. They are powerful. Even explosive. Words can start wars, or families. Words can wound, they can shock and offend. Words can also heal, and explain, and give hope and understanding. Words have an intrinsic worth, and there is pride and delight in using the right word. Anyone who chops cotton with an axe is a hoer.