B Movies and Bad History: Texas Through the World's Eyes

Dr. Don Graham is J. Frank Dobie Regents Professor of American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Graham’s research interests include Southwestern American Literature/ Film, Nineteenth & Twentieth Century American Literature/Culture, and Australian Literature.  His publications include No Name on the Bullet:  A Biography of Audie Murphy (1989), Cowboys and Cadillacs:  How Hollywood Looks at Texas (1983); and Kings of Texas:  The 150-Year Saga of an American Ranching Empire (2003), which won the T.I.L. Carr P. Collins Prize for Best Nonfiction Book.

In 2005 Graham received the Best General Criticism Award from the City/Regional Magazine Association, for his literary columns in Texas Monthly.  In 2006 he received the Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching at UT. In 2007 TCU Press published the anthology Literary Austin, which he edited. In 2008 Graham received the A.C. Greene Literary Award from the West Texas Book and Music Festival, and TCU Press published State Fare:  An Irreverent Guide to Texas Movies. In 2011 he received the Tom Cable Award for Upper-division Teaching, and a collection of essays, State of Minds:  Texas Culture and Its Discontents, was published by the University of Texas Press. In  2013 he received the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. In 2014 he received an Alcalde Top Ten Professors Ever Award. His most recent book is a study of the Australian writer: Michael Wilding and The Fiction of Instant Experience: Short Stories, Novels, Memoirs, 1963-2012, published in 2013.  He is currently completing a history of the making of the film Giant.