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In partnership with THE ALAMO, the San Antonio Book Festival proudly presents GET LIT with Stephen Harrigan, New York Times best-selling author of Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas. Harrigan will be joined in conversation by Clay Smith, SABF’s Literary Director.
Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes, it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.
Event Details:
4:30 PM Book sales & signing
6:00 PM Conversation
7:00 PM Book sales & signing
Free & open to the public – PLEASE RESERVE YOUR TICKETS BELOW
© Kenny Braun
About the author: Stephen Harrigan was born in Oklahoma City in 1948 and has lived in Texas since the age of five, growing up in Abilene and Corpus Christi. He is the author of 11 books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Gates of the Alamo, which became a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and received a number of awards. Harrigan is a longtime writer for Texas Monthly, and his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of other publications as well, including The Atlantic, Outside, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Conde Nast Traveler, Audubon, Travel Holiday, Life, American History, National Geographic and Slate. A 1970 graduate of the University of Texas, Harrigan lives in Austin, where for twenty years he taught at UT’s James A. Michener Center for Writers. He is the recipient of the Texas Book Festival’s Texas Writers Award, the Lon Tinkle Award for lifetime achievement from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Texas Medal of Arts award from the Texas Cultural Trust, and has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. Stephen Harrigan and his wife Sue Ellen have three daughters and six grandchildren.
About the book: The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world.
Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times-bestselling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea.
