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William A. "Bill" Owens
"Every region has its way of life, but not many regions have been as fortunate as East Texas: only
a few have produced literary interpreters as skilled, as sympathetic, and as acutely observant as William
Owens." (William Pilkington)
The Cushing Memorial Library holds the personal papers of William A.
"Bill" Owens, noted Texas folklorist and author. Born in 1905 in a small east Texas town
near the Red River, educated in a one room school house that ran maybe five months out of the year, Bill
Owens became one of Texas' leading writers.
Smitten with the fervor to write somewhere near the fifth grade, Owens attended East
Texas State Teachers College, Paris Junior College, and Southern Methodist University. In 1936, he entered
the University of Texas graduate school but transferred to the University of Iowa where he attained a
doctoral degree in 1941. As he sought his degrees, he also taught, his first job being in his hometown of
Pin Hook. During the ensuing years, Owens taught at Wesley College at Greenville, Mississippi State College,
Texas A&M, Columbia University in New York and served as director of research in folk materials at the
University of Texas.
Owens produced a dozen major works and numerous articles. Most of these articles,
with the exception of Slave Mutiny: The Revolt of the Schooner Amistad, are about Texas and its
folklore. He was cited three times by the Texas Institute of Letters for outstanding books, including an
award for best first novel in 1954 with Walking on Borrowed Land, and for This Stubborn
Soil in 1966, a work called the best of its kind ever written by a Texan. Another of his
books, Season of Weathering, won the 1974 Southwest Library Association's award for best
nonfiction book. His many honors include being named a lecturer in 1971-73 for the National Humanities
Series at Princeton.
Owens' collection documents his teaching and writing career from 1928-1980 and
includes personal correspondence, books, book manuscripts, book reviews, articles, short stories, speeches,
photographs, and aluminum disc recordings made by Owens of various folksingers and musicians in the South.
Items of special interest in the collections include lyrics to many folksongs and recordings made by
Owens in the 1930's and 1940's, as well as recorded readings of Robert Frost, interviews of early Texas oil
pioneers, legal papers concerning the plagiarism of Slave Mutiny, histories of World War II, and
letters of Roy Bedichek, J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Mody C. Boatright.
The majority of the collection was purchased from Dr. Owens in 1977 with the
assistance of the Friends of the Texas A&M Libraries and the Texas A&M University Association
of Former Students. The collection is divided into three parts, based on order of their receipt. Finding
guides for each division are available on-line.
Much of the above information was taken from a 1986 Bryan-College Station Eagle article by Hugh Nations.
 
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