The autobiography of a durable sinner

In the early 'twenties articles by Owen P. White began to appear with increasing frequency in the Mercury and The New York Times--fresh, gutsy, and realistic pieces about the old West that created a stir. An imaginative New Yorker returned from El Paso with the word that he'd met the author--"an old man about sixty-five who always wore his pants in his boots and whose long gray whiskers were perpetually stained with tobacco juice." After this picturesque description, Owen White was a momentary disappointment when he came to New York to embark on a writing career. Though he characterized himself as "lean, lanky, uncurried and hardboiled," he was certainly no sixty-five (he still hasn't attained that age, twenty years later), but he concealed for a while a past less exclusively Texan than the editors believed.

His past, be it said, was varied enough. Born and brought up in the Southwest in its toughest period, he had observed more violence than most men would see in a thousand years. He had known such killers as John Wesley Hardin and admired such glamourous females as Kitty Freeman and Alice Abbott (who died when Kitty, a rival proprietor, shot with the old .45). But he had been exposed also to more formal education and narrowly escaped being a lawyer on two occasions, one of them in New York itself. He had had his fling at high finance, been farmer, rancher, merchant, columnist, poet, and historian. But the frontier West was his gold mine, and he dug deep into it for the rich material that later found the pages of Collier's, when he became one of its editors.

The years that followed were no less exciting. He took the lid off Texas politics (and got himself involved in at least two colossal libel suits), another lid off municipal corruption, still another off the prohibition hypocrisy, and almost--till an assassin forestalled him--the crown from the head of the Kingfish.

This autobiography is like none ever before written, a lusty pageant of a life that has been as entertaining as it is uniquely American.